In the High Court of Justice in London, Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for allegedly infringing the intellectual property rights of millions of images from its platform, which Stability AI used to train its AI image generator, Stable Diffusion. According to the lawsuit, Stability AI violated several of Getty Image’s Terms of Service, such as image scraping used to train its AI image generator.
Getty Image is alleging that Stability AI has unlawfully copied and processed images from its website without obtaining a license for their commercial exploitation, including copyright in content that belongs to or is represented by Getty Images.
Previously in September, as was then reported, Getty Images banned AI-generated content on its platform, including images produced by Stable Diffusion, fearing possible (future) copyright lawsuits.
Three artists have launched a class action lawsuit in San Francisco, USA against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, creators of artificial intelligence (AI) art generators, alleging intellectual property rights infringements.
The artists argue that the producers of AI art generators violated the copyrights of millions of users by scraping the web to train their art algorithms without getting approval from content owners or giving credit or compensation. As such, they are seeking damages as well as an injunction to prevent future harm from the AI tools in question.
The lawsuit alleges direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement related to forgeries, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violation of class members’ rights of publicity, unlawful competition, and a breach of terms of service.
A new law approved by the Belarusian parliament allows the use of digital content without the copyright owners’ consent when such holders reside in ‘unfriendly countries’ that have placed sanctions on Belarus. While the measure enables the use of software, films, music, television programmes, and other audiovisual works without copyright permission, royalties still need to be paid for such uses. The funds are to be deposited into the account of the Belarusian Patent Office, where copyright holders would be able to claim them within three years.
The law also permits parallel imports, a process in which authentic goods are brought in through alternative supply lines without the intellectual property owners’ consent. This measure applies to imports from any country, if the concerned goods are included in a list of products deemed as essential for the internal market.
The legislation is to apply until the end of 2024.
A proposed class action in California challenges Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI for alleged copyright violation around GitHub Copilot, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered open source code generating assistant. The lawsuit alleges that Copilot is trained on public repositories of code extracted from the web, some of which is licensed content. While the case is in the initial stages, and the defendants will argue that their use of code qualifies as fair use under US copyright law, the outcome of this lawsuit may have significant consequences for the future of generative AI.
The EU moved to exclude the UK from Horizon Europe calls on sensitive quantum projects due to doubts over the UK`s eagerness to provide EU researchers with access to UK quantum programmes and to comply with intellectual property rules.
Initially, the European Commission decided to open up 2021–2022 calls to certain UK entities if they gave reassurances they would protect EU strategic interests, assets, autonomy and security, and respected reciprocity and intellectual property conditions. After assessing the proposals submitted by the UK, the EU has excluded quantum technologies companies that applied to take part.
‘Despite earlier statements from the UK side, when the moment of verification came, the EU realised that these reciprocity conditions were not on the table, and we got to the point where the Commission was not seeing enough evidence for an inclusion’, said Tommaso Calarco, director of the Institute for Quantum Control in Jülich, and one of the coordinators of the Quantum Flagship, a multi-billion EU Commission research initiative.
The Italian football club Juventus won one of the first known judgements by a European court regarding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their clash with early registered trademarks. The Court of Rome determined that Blockeras violated Juventus’ trademark rights by printing and distributing 68 NFT cards.
Juventus filed a lawsuit against Blockeras earlier this year, accusing the fantasy football game platform of infringing its trademarks through NFTs linked to trading cards featuring former Juventus superstar Christian Vieri in a Juventus jersey.
Juventus has requested a temporary restraining order to stop the allegedly infringing conduct. Blockeras has claimed that the football club’s marks protection in class 9 from Nice Classification does not cover NFTs.
The court found that it is unnecessary for NFTs to be mentioned precisely in the list of goods of Nice Classification because other included goods can also cover new digital products.
A federal judge in California dismissed blockchain platform Dfinity Foundation’s trademark lawsuit over the infinity-symbol logo against Meta Platforms Inc. The judge ruled that the two logos were not similar enough to sustain the lawsuit, and given the targeted audience, it is unlikely to create any confusion among consumers.
In a trademark infringement lawsuit, Dfinity alleged that Meta copied its infinity-symbol logo, which was similar to the one used by Dfinity.
The court found that Meta’s logo was not likely to cause consumer confusion with Dfinity’s rainbow infinity logo as it is not similar either in shape or colour to Meta’s log.
Programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick and several other litigators have filed a class action lawsuit in a US federal court against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI over the legality of the GitHub Copilot – a tool that relies on artificial intelligence to suggest code and entire functions in real-time. The lawsuit argues these companies – by training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories – violate the legal rights of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licences on GitHub. It is further claimed that the companies make significant profits by scraping copyright materials from the web and training their software on copyright-protected data. While the case is still in its early stage, it may have significant ramifications for the future of AI and open-source licence practice.
The UK Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, which handles cases relating to intellectual property disputes, has issued a detailed guide for businesses, lawyers, and attorneys on how to bring a case to the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court. The guide covers how the court’s processes function and offers recommendations where necessary, including how to:
- start a claim in the court
- serve the claim form
- write a statement of the case
- put together a trial bundle
