Google: Another Unfair Allegation and You Are Probably Sorry
July 10, 2024
Just as some thought Google was finally playing nice with content rightsholders, a group of textbook publishers begs to differ—in court. TorrentFreak reports, “Google ‘Profits from Pirated Textbooks’ Publishers’ Lawsuit Claims.” The claimants accuse Google of not only ignoring textbook pirates in search results, but of actively promoting them to line its own coffers. Writer Andy Maxwell quotes the complaint:
“’Of course, Google’s Shopping Ads for Infringing Works … do not use photos of the pirates’ products; rather, they use unauthorized photos of the Publishers’ own textbooks, many of which display the Marks. Thus, with Infringing Shopping Ads, this “strong sense of the product” that Google is giving is a bait-and-switch,’ the complaint alleges.”
The complaint emphasizes Google actively creates, ranks, and targets ads for pirated products. It also assesses the quality of advertised sites. It is fishy, then, that infringing works often rank before or near ads for the originals.
In case one is still willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt, the complaint lists several reasons the company should know better. There are the sketchy site names like “Cheapbok,” and “Biz Ninjas.” Then there are the unrealistically low prices. A semester’s worth of textbooks should break the bank; that is just part of the college experience. Perhaps even more damning is Google’s own assertion it verifies sellers’ identities. The write-up continues:
“[The publishers] claim that verification means Google has the ability to communicate with sellers via email or verified phone numbers. In cases where Google was advised that a seller was offering pirated content and Google users were still able to place orders after clicking an ad, ‘Google had the ability to stop the direct infringement entirely.’ In the majority of cases where pirate sellers predominantly or exclusively use Google Ads to reach their customer base, terminating their accounts would’ve had a significant impact on future sales.”
No doubt. Publishers have tried to address the issue through Google’s stated process of takedown notices to no avail. In fact, they allege, the company is downright hostile to any that push the issue. We learn:
“When the publishers sent follow-up notices for matters previously reported but not handled to their satisfaction, ‘Google threatened on multiple occasions to stop reviewing all the Publishers’ notices for up to six months,’ the complaint alleges. Google’s response was due to duplicate requests; the company warned that if that happened three or more times on the same request, it would ‘consider that particular request to be manifestly unfounded’ which could lead the company to ‘temporarily stop reviewing your requests for a period of up to 180 days.’”
Ah, corporate logic. Will Google’s pirate booty be worth the legal headaches? The textbook publishers bringing suit include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Macmillan Holdings, LLC; Elsevier Inc., Elsevier B.V., and McGraw Hill LLC. The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Cynthia Murrell, July 10, 2024
Prediction: Next Target Up — Public Libraries
June 26, 2024
This essay is the work of a dinobaby. Unlike some folks, no smart software improved my native ineptness.
The publishers (in spirit at least) have kneecapped the Internet Archive. If you don’t know what the online service does or did, it does not matter. I learned from the estimable ShowBiz411.com site, a cultural treasure is gone. Forget digital books, the article “Paramount Erases Archives of MTV Website, Wipes Music, Culture History After 30 Plus Years” says:
Parent company Paramount, formerly Viacom, has tossed twenty plus years of news archives. All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by music and political writers ever written. It’s as if MTV never existed. (It’s the same for VH1.com, all gone.)
Why? The write up couches the savvy business decision of the Paramount leadership this way:
There’s no precedent for this, and no valid reason. Just cheapness and stupidity.
Tibby, my floppy ear Frenchie, is listening to music from the Internet Archive. He knows the publishers removed 500,000 books. Will he lose access to his beloved early 20th century hill music? Will he ever be able to watch reruns of the rock the casbah music video? No. He is a risk. A threat. A despicable knowledge seeker. Thanks to myself for this nifty picture.
My knowledge of MTV and VH1 is limited. I do recall telling my children, “Would you turn that down, please?” What a waste of energy. Future students of American culture will have a void. I assume some artifacts of the music videos will remain. But the motherlode is gone. Is this a loss? On one hand, no. Thank goodness I will not have to glimpse performs rocking the casbah. On the other hand, yes. Archaeologists study bits of stone, trying to figure out how those who left them built Machu Pichu did it. The value of lost information to those in the future is tough to discuss. But knowledge products may be like mine tailings. At some point, a bright person can figure out how to extract trace elements in quantity.
I have a slightly different view of these two recent cultural milestones. I have a hunch that the publishers want to protect their intellectual property. Internet Archive rolled over because its senior executives learned from their lawyers that lawsuits about copyright violations would be tough to win. The informed approach was to delete 500,000 books. Imagine an online service like the Internet Archive trying to be a library.
That brings me to what I think is going on. Copyright litigation will make quite a lot of digital information disappear. That means that increasing fees to public libraries for digital copies of books to “loan” to patrons must go up. Libraries who don’t play ball may find that those institutions will be faced with other publisher punishments: No American Library Association after parties, no consortia discounts, and at some point no free books.
Yes, libraries will have to charge a patron to check out a physical book and then the “publishers” will get a percentage.
The Andrew Carnegie “free” thing is wrong. Libraries rip off the publishers. Authors may be mentioned, but what publisher cares about 99 percent of its authors? (I hear crickets.)
Several thoughts struck me as I was walking my floppy ear Frenchie:
- The loss of information (some of which may have knowledge value) is no big deal in a social structure which does not value education. If people cannot read, who cares about books? Publishers and the wretches who write them. Period.
- The video copyright timebomb of the Paramount video content has been defused. Let’s keep those lawyers at bay, please. Who will care? Nostalgia buffs and the parents of the “stars”?
- The Internet Archive has music; libraries have music. Those are targets not on Paramount’s back. Who will shoot at these targets? Copyright litigators. Go go go.
Net net: My prediction is that libraries must change to a pay-to-loan model or get shut down. Who wants informed people running around disagreeing with lawyers, accountants, and art history majors?
Stephen E Arnold, June 26, 2024
Another Small Victory for OpenAI Against Authors
March 12, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
For those following the fight between human content creators and AI firms, score one for the algorithm engineers. TorrentFreak reports, “Court Dismisses Authors’ Copyright Infringement Claims Against OpenAI.” At issue is generative AI’s practice of feeding on humans’ work, without compensation, in order to mimic it. Multiple suits have been filed by record labels, writers, and visual artists. Reporter Ernesto Van der Sar writes:
“Several of the lawsuits filed by book authors include a piracy component. The cases allege that tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI, used the controversial Books3 dataset to train their models. The Books3 dataset was created by AI researcher Shawn Presser in 2020, who scraped the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik. The general vision was that the plaintext collection of more than 195,000 books, which is nearly 37GB in size, could help AI enthusiasts build better models. The vision wasn’t wrong; large text archives are great training material for Large Language Models, but many authors disapprove of their works being used in this manner, without permission or compensation.”
A large group of rights holders have a football team. Those big folks are chasing the small but feisty opponent down the field. Which team will score? Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Keep up the good enough work.
Is that so unreasonable? Maybe not, but existing copyright law did not foresee this situation. We learn:
“After reviewing input from both sides, California District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled on the matter. In her order, she largely sides with OpenAI. The vicarious copyright infringement claim fails because the court doesn’t agree that all output produced by OpenAI’s models can be seen as a derivative work. To survive, the infringement claim has to be more concrete.”
The plaintiffs are not out of moves, however. They can still file an amended complaint. But unless updated legislation is passed in the meantime, they may just be rebuffed again. So all they need is for Congress to act quickly to protect artists from tech firms. Any day now.
Cynthia Murrell, March 12, 2024
Content Mastication: A Controversial Business Tactic
January 25, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
In the midst of the unfolding copyright issues, I found this post quite interesting. Torrent Freak published a story titled “Meta Admits Use of ‘Pirated’ Book Dataset to Train AI.” Is the story spot on? I sure don’t know. Nevertheless, the headline is a magnetic one. The story reports:
The cases allege that tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI, used the controversial Books3 dataset to train their models. The Books3 dataset has a clear piracy angle. It was created by AI researcher Shawn Presser in 2020, who scraped the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik. This book archive was publicly hosted by digital archiving collective ‘The Eye‘ at the time, alongside various other data sources.
A combination of old-fashioned content collection and smart systems move information from Point A (a copyright owner’s night table) to a smart software system. MSFT’s second class Copilot Bing thing created this cartoon. Sigh. Not even good enough now in my opinion.
What was in the Books3 data collection? The TF story elucidates:
The general vision was that the plaintext collection of more than 195,000 books, which is nearly 37GB…
What did Meta allegedly do to make its Llama smarter than the average member of the Camelidae family? Let’s roll the TF quote:
Responding to a lawsuit from writer/comedian Sarah Silverman, author Richard Kadrey, and other rights holders, the tech giant admits that “portions of Books3” were used to train the Llama AI model before its public release. “Meta admits that it used portions of the Books3 dataset, among many other materials, to train Llama 1 and Llama 2,” Meta writes in its answer [to a court].
The article does not include any statements like “Thank you for the question” or “I don’t know. My team will provide the answer at the earliest possible moment.” Nope. Just an alleged admission.
How will the Meta and parallel copyright legal matter evolve? Beyond Search has zero clue. The US judicial system has deep and mysterious logic. One thing is certain: Senior executives do not like uncertainty and risk. The copyright litigation seems tailored to cause some techno feudalists to imagine a world in which laws, annoying regulators, and people yapping about intellectual property were nudged into a different line of work. One example which comes to mind is building secure bunkers or taking care of the lawn.
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2024
PicRights in the News: Happy Holidays
November 28, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
With the legal eagles cackling in their nests about artificial intelligence software using content without permission, the notion of rights enforcement is picking up steam. One niche in rights enforcement is the business of using image search tools to locate pictures and drawings which appear in blogs or informational Web pages.
StackOverflow hosts a thread by a developer who linked to or used an image more than a decade ago. On November 23, 2023, the individual queried those reading Q&A section about a problem. “Am I Liable for Re-Sharing Image Links Provided via the Stack Exchange API?”
The legal eagle jabs with his beak at the person who used an image, assuming it was open source. The legal eagle wants justice to matter. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. A couple of tries, still not on point, but good enough.
The explanation of the situation is interesting to me for three reasons: [a] The alleged infraction took place in 2010; [b] Stack Exchange is a community learning and sharing site which manifests some open sourciness; and [c] information about specific rights, content ownership, and data reached via links is not front and center.
Ignorance of the law, at least in some circles, is not excuse for a violation. The cited post reveals that an outfit doing business as PicRights wants money for the unlicensed use of an image or art in 2010 (at least that’s how I read the situation).
What’s interesting is the related data provided by those who are responding to the request for information; for example:
- A law firm identified as Higbee & Asso. is the apparent pointy end of the spear pointed at the alleged offender’s wallet
- A link to an article titled “Is PicRights a Scam? Are Higbee & Associates Emails a Scam?”
- A marketing type of write up called “How To Properly Deal With A PicRights Copyright Unlicensed Image Letter”.
How did the story end? Here’s what the person accused of infringing did:
According to Law I am liable. I have therefore decided to remove FAQoverflow completely, all 90k+ pages of it, and will negotiate with PicRights to pay them something less than the AU$970 that they are demanding.
What are the downsides to the loss of the FAQoverflow content? I don’t know. But I assume that the legal eagles, after gobbling one snack, are aloft and watching the AI companies. That’s where the big bucks will be. Legal eagles have a fondness for big bucks I believe.
Net net: Justice is served by some interesting birds, eagles and whatnot.
Stephen E Arnold, November 28, 2023
Microsoft, the Techno-Lord: Avoid My Galloping Steed, Please
November 27, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The Merriam-Webster.com online site defines “responsibility” this way:
re·?spon·?si·?bil·?I·?ty
1 : the quality or state of being responsible: such as
: moral, legal, or mental accountability
: RELIABILITY, TRUSTWORTHINESS
: something for which one is responsible
The online sector has a clever spin on responsibility; that is, in my opinion, the companies have none. Google wants people who use its online tools and post content created with those tools to make sure that what the Google system outputs does not violate any applicable rules, regulations, or laws.
In a traditional fox hunt, the hunters had the “right” to pursue the animal. If a farmer’s daughter were in the way, it was the farmer’s responsibility to keep the silly girl out of the horse’s path. That will teach them to respect their betters I assume. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. I know you would not put me in a legal jeopardy, would you? Now what are the laws pertaining to copyright for a cartoon in Armenia? Darn, I have to know that, don’t I.
Such a crafty way of defining itself as the mere creator of software machines has inspired Microsoft to follow a similar path. The idea is that anyone using Microsoft products, solutions, and services is “responsible” to comply with applicable rules, regulations, and laws.
Tidy. Logical. Complete. Just like a nifty algebra identity.
Microsoft believes they have no liability if an AI, like Copilot, is used to infringe on copyrighted material.
The write up includes this passage:
So this all comes down to, according to Microsoft, that it is providing a tool, and it is up to users to use that tool within the law. Microsoft says that it is taking steps to prevent the infringement of copyright by Copilot and its other AI products, however, Microsoft doesn’t believe it should be held legally responsible for the actions of end users.
The write up (with no Jimmy Kimmel spin) includes this statement, allegedly from someone at Microsoft:
Microsoft is willing to work with artists, authors, and other content creators to understand concerns and explore possible solutions. We have adopted and will continue to adopt various tools, policies, and filters designed to mitigate the risk of infringing outputs, often in direct response to the feedback of creators. This impact may be independent of whether copyrighted works were used to train a model, or the outputs are similar to existing works. We are also open to exploring ways to support the creative community to ensure that the arts remain vibrant in the future.
From my drafty office in rural Kentucky, the refusal to accept responsibility for its business actions, its products, its policies to push tools and services on users, and the outputs of its cloudy system is quite clever. Exactly how will a user of products pushed at users like Edge and its smart features prevent a user from acquiring from a smart Microsoft system something that violates an applicable rule, regulation, or law?
But legal and business cleverness is the norm for the techno-feudalists. Let the surfs deal with the body of the child killed when the barons chase a fox through a small leasehold. I can hear the brave royals saying, “It’s your fault. Your daughter was in the way. No, I don’t care that she was using the free Microsoft training materials to learn how to use our smart software.”
Yep, responsible. The death of the hypothetical child frees up another space in the training course.
Stephen E Arnold, November 27, 2023
Copyright Trolls: An Explanation Which Identifies Some Creatures
November 14, 2023
This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.
If you are not familiar with firms which pursue those who intentionally or unintentionally use another person’s work in their writings, you may not know what a “copyright troll” is. I want to point you to an interesting post from IntoTheMinds.com. The write up “PicRights + AFP: Une Opération de Copyright Trolling Bien Rodée.” appeared in 2021, and it was updated in June 2023. The original essay is in French, but you may want to give Google Translate a whirl if your high school French is but a memoire dou dou.
A copyright troll is looking in the window of a blog writer. The troll is waiting for the writer to use content covered by copyright and for which a fee must be paid. The troll is patient. The blog writer is clueless. Thanks, Microsoft Bing. Nice troll. Do you perhaps know one?
The write up does a good job of explaining trollism with particular reference to an estimable outfit called PicRights and the even more estimable Agence France-Presse. It also does a bit of critical review of the PicRights’ operation, including the use of language to alleged copyright violators about how their lives will take a nosedive if money is not paid promptly for the alleged transgression. There are some thoughts about what to do if and when a copyright troll like the one pictured courtesy of Microsoft Bing’s art generator. Some comments about the rules and regulations regarding trollism. The author includes a few observations about the rights of creators. And a few suggested readings are included. Of particular note is the discussion of an estimable legal eagle outfit doing business as Higbee and Associates. You can find that document at this link.
If you are interested in copyright trolling in general and PicRights in particular, I suggest you download the document. I am not sure how long it will remain online.
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2023
Getty and Its Licensed Smart Software Art
September 26, 2023
![Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]](http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t1-1.gif "Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]")
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid. (Yep, the dinobaby is back from France. Thanks to those who made the trip professionally and personally enjoyable.)
The illustration shows a very, very happy image rights troll. The cloud of uncertainty from AI generated images has passed. Now the rights software bots, controlled by cheerful copyright trolls, can scour the Web for unauthorized image use. Forget the humanoids. The action will be from tireless AI generators and equally robust bots designed to charge a fee for the image created by zeros and ones. Yes!
A quite joyful copyright troll displays his killer moves. Thanks, MidJourney. The gradient descent continues, right into the legal eagles’ nests.
“Getty Made an AI Generator That Only Trained on Its Licensed Images” reports:
Generative AI by Getty Images (yes, it’s an unwieldy name) is trained only on the vast Getty Images library, including premium content, giving users full copyright indemnification. This means anyone using the tool and publishing the image it created commercially will be legally protected, promises Getty. Getty worked with Nvidia to use its Edify model, available on Nvidia’s generative AI model library Picasso.
This is exciting. Will the images include a tough-to-discern watermark? Will the images include a license plate, a social security number, or a just a nifty sting of harmless digits?
The article does reveal the money angle:
The company said any photos created with the tool will not be included in the Getty Images and iStock content libraries. Getty will pay creators if it uses their AI-generated image to train the current and future versions of the model. It will share revenues generated from the tool, “allocating both a pro rata share in respect of every file and a share based on traditional licensing revenue.”
Who will be happy? Getty, the trolls, or the designers who have a way to be more productive with a helping hand from the Getty robot? I think the world will be happier because monetization, smart software, and lawyers are a business model with legs… or claws.
Stephen E Arnold, September 26, 2023
Can Smart Software Get Copyright? Wrong?
September 15, 2023
It is official: copyrights are for humans, not machines. JD Supra brings us up to date on AI and official copyright guidelines in, “Using AI to Create a Work – Copyright Protection and Infringement.” The basic principle goes both ways. Creators cannot copyright AI-generated material unless they have manipulated it enough to render it a creative work. On the other hand, it is a violation to publish AI-generated content that resembles a copyright-protected work. As for feeding algorithms a diet of human-made media, that is not officially against the rules. Yet. We learn:
“To obtain copyright protection for a work containing AI-generated material, the work must have sufficient human input, such as sufficient modification of the AI output or the human selection or arrangement of the AI content. However, copyright protection would be limited to those ‘human-made’ elements. Past, pending, and future copyright applications need to identify explicitly the human element and disclaim the AI-created content if it is more than minor. For existing registrations, a supplementary registration may be necessary. Works created using AI are subject to the same copyright infringement analysis applicable to any work. The issue with using AI to create works is that the sources of the original works may not be identified, so an infringement analysis cannot be conducted until the cease-and-desist letter is received. No court has yet adopted the theory that merely using an AI database means the resulting work is automatically an infringing derivative work if it is not substantially similar to the protectable elements in the copyrighted work.”
The article cites the Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence, 88 Fed. Reg. 16,190 (March 16, 2023). It notes those guidelines were informed by a decision handed down in February, Zarya v Dawn, which involved a comic book with AI-generated content. the Copyright Office sliced and diced elements, specifying:
“… The selection and arrangement of the images and the text were the result of human authorship and thus copyrightable, but the AI-generated images resulting from human prompts were not. The prompts ‘influenced,’ but did not ‘dictate,’ the resulting image, so the applicant was not the ‘mastermind’ and therefore not the author of the images. Further, the applicant’s edits to the images were too minor to be deemed copyrightable.”
Ah, the fine art of splitting hairs. As for training databases packed with protected content, the article points to pending lawsuits by artists against Stability AI, MidJourney, and Deviant Art. We are told those cases may be dismissed on technical grounds, but are advised to watch for similar cases in the future. Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2023
Rights Issues: How Can Money Be Extracted from Content?
March 20, 2023
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I gave up on “real” publishers when the outfits with which I was working in Sweden and the UK went to the big printing press in the multiverse. Yep, failure. I am mindful about image rights too, but that doesn’t mean my Craiyon.com images or the clip art I have in my files from the years of CD-ROMs with illustrations that were “free to use.” Ho ho ho on that marketing blather.
I want to call attention to two news items and then offer a comment or two not presented by other dinobabies watching the wide, wild, wonderful world of digital information.
The first item is the Italian government’s conclusion that the illustration by Leonardo d Vinci is not in the public domain. I used to have a T shirt I bought in Florence with the image on the overpriced, made-in-China garment. I wonder if that shop on the bridge near the secret passage some big wheel used in the 16th century? I would assume that the Italian government has hoovered these and converted them to recycling fodder. You can read about this in the article “Italy Decides That Leonardo da Vinci’s 500 Year Old Works Are Not In The Public Domain.” The subtitle of the write up is “from the locking-up-in-the-public-domain department.” The story reports:
According to the Italian Cultural Heritage Code and relevant case law, faithful digital reproductions of works of cultural heritage — including works in the Public Domain — can only be used for commercial purposes against authorization and payment of a fee. Importantly though, the decision to require authorization and claim payment is left to the discretion of each cultural institution (see articles 107 and 108). In practice, this means that cultural institutions have the option to allow users to reproduce and reuse faithful digital reproductions of Public Domain works for free, including for commercial uses. This flexibility is fundamental for institutions to support open access to cultural heritage.
The operative word is “fee.”
The second item is about Internet Archive, a controversial outfit from the point of view of some publishers. The idea is that Internet Archive offers electronic books for free. Free, not fee, is an important concept. Publishers, writers, agents, book cover artists, and probably a French bulldog or two want to get a piece of the money generated by charging for electronic books. Look Amazon does it, and publishers are not thrilled. But there is some money paid out which is going the right direction.
The report I read is “The Internet Archive Is a Library.” Libraries and publishers have a long history. On one hand, publishers love to sell books to libraries. On the other hand, libraries are not turning cartwheels because libraries loan eBooks and other digital artifacts to patrons. As long as the money streams flow, publishers and rights holders are semi-happy, a bit like a black sheep of the family getting a few bucks when Uncle Tom goes to the big printing shop in the sky where my defunct publishers hopefully work setting type by hand.
The article says:
Despite its incredible library collections, which serve the needs of millions of people, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons Inc., and Penguin Random House assert that the Internet Archive is not a real library.
If one is not a real library, that institution must pay for books. That seems clear to the publishers. I have wondered why the US Library of Congress was not moving in the same direction as the Internet Archive. Oh, well. What about the Special Library Association? Yeah, oh, well. And the American Library Association in concert with Harvard or Stanford? Oh, well.
So the Internet Archive is in jeopardy.
Several observations:
- Entities which could have assumed this job in concern with Internet Archive could have been more proactive. They weren’t, so here we are.
- Publishers are hungry for revenue, almost any type of revenue stream will do. Why not extract money from an outfit trying to perform a useful library-type function? Sorry, we want money and people can buy information from us summarizes the position of some publishers on earth and possibly in the big printing facility amidst the stars.
- Legal eagles love books. Plus those folks sometimes buy books to decorate their offices in the event a meeting is required in a suitably classy environment. Do lawyers read these books? Maybe, but I think professional publishers sell online content to them. Thus, in today’s world it makes sense for lawyers to determine what is a library and what is not, what content is free and which is not. I think I understand, but I am not going to call my attorney because I have to pay in 15 minute increments.
Net net: Libraries are for many negative spaces. Some books present information which is bad; therefore, ban or burn the books. Now we can defund regular libraries and shut down the online outfits. Publishers may be thrilled. Others may not care. I like libraries, but dinobabies don’t have influence. I am glad I am old.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2023
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
