Latest / The Road to Accountable AI / Dale Cendali: How Courts (and Maybe Congress!) Will Determine AI's Copyright Fate
Transcript
- 0:01Yeah, welcome to the Road to Accountable AI.
- 0:04Happy to be here.
- 0:05Thank you.
- 0:06You've been in this space of intellectual property law for some time, uh involved with a number of important influential cases.
- 0:16Technology is always a part of what happens in IP, but is technology changing faster?
- 0:22Are the issues more challenging today with AI?
- 0:25don't think technology is changing faster.
- 0:29It's certainly changing.
- 0:30But whether it was the creation of movable type or a photocopier or the internet or worried about Y2K, there's always something new from a technological perspective.
- 0:44And the law and thinking in business needs to adapt.
- 0:49So I don't feel like it's changing faster.
- 0:51I just feel like
- 0:53With AI, this is a moment in time where there is the latest, bigger change.
- 1:00So let's get into some of those issues with AI.
- 1:03We'll start on the input side in terms of the training of models with copyrighted information.
- 1:10There have been a whole slew of cases filed against uh AI developers.
- 1:16Can you just first generally give us a sense of what the state of play is legally?
- 1:20Sure.
- 1:21According to the Copyright Alliance, over 30 lawsuits have been filed already in this space with regard to the input side.
- 1:33And to me, there are a few interesting things to note.
- 1:36First off, let's make sure we know what we're talking about.
- 1:39When we say the input side, that's the side that focuses on the cases where the primary claim, there could be other claims, but is based on
- 1:48that you use my copyrighted work to train your LLM, your large language model, to do AI work.
- 1:58And so it's concerned about that, the training to create the AI.
- 2:06And to me, there's a few interesting things about the cases that have been filed so far.
- 2:11First, it's interesting to me that they're groups of stakeholders.
- 2:17who were filing them.
- 2:18And by that I mean you have authors and writers, like in the Authors Guild case, and you see authors and writers complaining.
- 2:28You see news publishers, like the New York Times case and the Dow Jones case.
- 2:34uh You see visual artists and photographers, like Anderson versus Stability AI and the Getty Images case.
- 2:43You have music cases by people like Concord Music with musicians and lyricists and people concerned about that.
- 2:51And there have even been some suits by uh software developments like Doe versus GitHub.
- 2:58So what you're seeing is people are approaching it from their own particular focus and are bringing lawsuits that are focused on kind of their angle, their.
- 3:11their type of work.
- 3:12It's not just one type of work.
- 3:15The second thing I wanted to mention about these cases, which are a little different, is typically copyright cases are a particular copyright holder is suing about their work
- 3:27being infringed.
- 3:28And there are plenty of cases like that.
- 3:31But you're also seeing a number of class action cases being filed in this space.
- 3:37And that's a little bit more unusual for copyright cases.
- 3:40And it's going to be interesting to see whether those classes are going to be certified, how they're going to be certified, and what their potential impact might be on the
- 3:53litigation.
- 3:54So the bottom line is there's a lot of focus on these kinds of input cases from a lot of different sources and some different procedural frameworks.
- 4:07One of the core issues though is whether this material can be used as fair use even if it is protected under copyright.
- 4:17Can you help people who are not familiar with the legal issues understand at least what are the courts going to have to work through to make those determinations?
- 4:25Right.
- 4:25Well, one of the things that the courts will do is a threshold matter is does someone have a copyright?
- 4:31And under US law, you're supposed to have a registered copyright registration or else be turned down for a copyright registration.
- 4:40Then you can effectively appeal that to a court.
- 4:43So you need to own a copyright to start with.
- 4:45And then someone needs to copy what it is that you have, which usually the model or the fact pattern for these input cases
- 4:55that's usually not so hard because almost by definition, these cases involve copying of the copyrighted material.
- 5:03That's the whole point of it.
- 5:06And so then the issue is, well, is that fair use or not?
- 5:09And fair use under United States law is, courts are supposed to look at four factors at a minimum.
- 5:17They can consider other things like public policy or special things.
- 5:21but those four factors are the purpose and character of the use.
- 5:25Like what are you using it for?
- 5:27What's your purpose?
- 5:28What's your justification?
- 5:30Second, the second factor is what's the nature of the work?
- 5:34Works that are more factual, more functional, like computer programs tend to get less protection than more creative works, like a novel or something that's highly expressive.
- 5:47The third factor is
- 5:49How much of the work are you using?
- 5:51Are you copying all of it or just a small amount of it?
- 5:54And then the last factor is the effect of the use on the market or potential market for the work.
- 6:01And in AI cases, that focuses a lot on is there a market for training data?
- 6:07Was there one originally?
- 6:08Is there one now?
- 6:10How should that be factored in in light of the other policies?
- 6:13And those are the kinds of things that courts will be looking at from a various perspective.
- 6:19And obviously, your litigator, in any case, you would be making an argument based on those factors if their use is an issue.
- 6:27When I talk to people about this that are not lawyers, they struggle with the fact that it's a balancing test.
- 6:32There's not a bright line.
- 6:33And it's not just that any one of those factors is necessarily enough by itself.
- 6:38So does this mean that courts are just going to resolve a whole bunch of individual cases one way or another?
- 6:47but we won't get to any clarity about the fundamental issues.
- 6:51No.
- 6:52And that's because we live in a world of precedent where, yes, it's one copyright statute, which also helps, but you learn from each case.
- 7:03And recently there were two Supreme Court cases that address fair use, Google v.
- 7:08Oracle, and then more recently Goldsmith v.
- 7:11Warhol, both of which tried to shed light on how courts should look at the four fair use factors.
- 7:19I'm confident that as time goes on and we get more courts digging into these oh AI cases, patterns will develop, thinking will develop, and things will become more clear.
- 7:34Although it is 100 % true that fair use is seen as very fact dependent.
- 7:42And what that means is this particular justification for
- 7:48the copying in one case may be different from another case.
- 7:52And the effect on the market might be more directly competitive and easy to understand and harmful in one case, and it might be much more indirect in a different case.
- 8:04And so there could be variations on the outcome depending on the facts.
- 8:10And frankly, that's how law works or otherwise one side would always win and one side would always lose.
- 8:17So on that point about precedent, you mentioned at the beginning that there's always waves of new technology.
- 8:23We had issues about intellectual property and fair use with the rise of the internet.
- 8:28uh Google makes copies of things on the internet to put in its database.
- 8:33There was a big case about Google Books where they were actually copying books and that was found to be fair use.
- 8:39how much does that internet wave of cases predetermine what's going to happen in the AI context?
- 8:47Well, I don't think anything predetermines everything, but you're absolutely right.
- 8:51People look at precedent.
- 8:52And you're mentioning the Google Books case.
- 8:55And that was a case where absolutely similar, you could argue, to training for data.
- 9:00That's where someone would say there's a parallel.
- 9:03Google was copying lots of copyrighted material in its entirety, not for purposes of AI, though, but for purposes of devising a search methodology that would let people
- 9:17find books.
- 9:18And one of the things about that case, and courts have talked about this, including some of my own, have been that it helped people find books.
- 9:27didn't act as a substitute for the books.
- 9:30It didn't replace books.
- 9:32It didn't deliver the content in the books, except perhaps for small snippets.
- 9:38It let people find books.
- 9:40And so both sides of the equation, those who are arguing
- 9:44uh for fair use in the AI context and those arguing against fair use in the AI context find things in the case to talk about that might be more or less similar to their
- 9:58particular uh case.
- 10:00But I don't think oh most people would feel that it's not an AI case.
- 10:06It's not on all fours with what the facts that people are dealing with here.
- 10:11So just like
- 10:13that case, just like the Google, the Oracle case, just like the Warhol case, a lot of these cases are going to have to be considered and the parts that are more relevant than
- 10:24others will be the ones that will be pulled out.
- 10:28And as you talked about, these cases involve various different modalities, text, images, music, and so forth.
- 10:36How likely is it that the outcomes are going to be different based on the kinds of things that are being at issue?
- 10:44Well, that again is going to be interesting.
- 10:47I don't know if it's going to be a big difference if it's, oh let's say it's a literary work versus a photograph.
- 10:56mean, both of those tend to be relatively expressive works.
- 10:59And I don't know.
- 11:01There could be reasons why the market might be different for one or the other or the justification, the transformative purpose could be different.
- 11:13But it's harder for me to see why that would necessarily make a huge difference given the nature of some of those works.
- 11:23You could see other circumstances though, something was, especially something that's used for, that's very scientific, for specific scientific research, especially if that wasn't
- 11:38substitutive, it didn't cause market harm.
- 11:42that could lead to a different kind of result potentially.
- 11:48But I think it would be more like the science stuff used for non-competitive purposes versus that seems more likely to be different than if it's a song versus a photograph
- 12:07versus a text.
- 12:09But I could be wrong and there could be reasons, very smart lawyers and judges we will deal with in those cases that will point out that there are differences that may be less
- 12:19obvious to us having this conversation now.
- 12:23The Copyright Office has a proceeding or they did a request for comments on AI and got, I think, 10,000 comments and then have a series of reports that they're putting out.
- 12:35And the most recent one was on this question of generative AI inputs.
- 12:39um What was your reaction to that report?
- 12:43Well, part of my reaction was just that there was a lot of reaction because the community was very interested in it.
- 12:53People were waiting and copyright lawyers were all saying to one another, when do you think they're going to come up with a report?
- 12:59Because they always do a very thorough job, the copyright office and the reports.
- 13:03as you know, there's three reports that they did.
- 13:07And this one from May dealt with fair use.
- 13:11dealt with generative AI and dealt with the inputs.
- 13:16And just to kind of step back as to what the report said, as that relates to the reaction to the report, one of the things the report said was that using copyrighted works to train
- 13:32AI models could be infringement of the right to reproduce the works.
- 13:39and that you really need to go back to Warhol, that's that very use case by the Supreme Court I mentioned, and assess whether the use was transformative and the copyright off is
- 13:51noted, that's a determination, that's a matter of degree.
- 13:55In other words, it's not just binary, it's transformative, it's definitely fair use, or it's not transformative, it's definitely not.
- 14:02It could be somewhere in between.
- 14:06And it said that
- 14:08gee, if you were taking a work to train something and it looks like you're doing it for the same audience as the original, that doesn't seem that transformative to me.
- 14:19So part of the report looked like it had stuff in it that suggested that there could be oh an issue and that there could be infringement.
- 14:33Same thing on the output side.
- 14:36Again, but the report
- 14:37consistent with what I was saying before, was very measured and had a lot of explanations about matter of degree and depending on the facts and how the law will evolve.
- 14:52But what's interesting to me is the reaction to the report because the Copyright Alliance, which I alluded to earlier, which is a coalition of
- 15:05various companies and people that own copyrights.
- 15:08They said that they were pleased with the report and that it struck the right balance between not saying everything was necessarily fair use or that everything necessarily
- 15:19wasn't fair use.
- 15:21And they agreed with the importance of Warhol and certain other stakeholders like the New York Times made similar kind of comments.
- 15:29On the other hand, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF,
- 15:35know, disagreed and felt that the report, you know, more firmly placed its thumb, they thought, on the side of saying it was copyright infringement and not a fair use.
- 15:45And similarly, the Chamber of Progress, which is a group formed by a number of different tech companies, was concerned that the Copyright Office didn't fully appreciate the uh
- 15:58constitutional incentive behind copyright of creating new works.
- 16:03And the thought was that, that,
- 16:05over broad copyright protection in their mind could stifle an invention and the advancement of technology.
- 16:13Of course, someone else could say, well, you need to have created these works to begin with in order to train it.
- 16:21what I'm, to me the interesting thing is that everybody is paying a lot of attention to what the Copyright Office says, trying to get learning and guidance from it.
- 16:33and are commenting on it and reacting to it from where they sit in their prism.
- 16:43Absolutely.
- 16:44And part of that points out that this is now a major uh policy issue, a major political issue, an issue with a lot of uh economic impact at stake on all sides.
- 16:56Again, going back to history, when we had the internet raising copyright issues 30 years ago in the US, eventually Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to address
- 17:06some of these issues.
- 17:07And historically at other times we have, for example, compulsory license.
- 17:11for radio and for streaming and things like that.
- 17:14How likely do you think it is that Congress will ultimately resolve these issues with some kind of mechanism?
- 17:20I can firmly say I don't know.
- 17:23All kidding aside, it's a volatile world in terms of not just copyright, but in terms of oh the legislature and what they might or might not do.
- 17:40But I think it is helpful to go back and look at, as you said, what happened with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because
- 17:49That was intended to strike a balance between the different coalitions.
- 17:54The thought was that the service providers that created this important thing, the internet that we all have come to know and love and rely on, or mostly love in any case, they
- 18:07needed to be protected with safe harbor so that they weren't responsible like a newspaper might be for things that users might post on their
- 18:18their sites.
- 18:20That's the premise behind a lot of the DMCA was to provide that type of safe harbor.
- 18:27On the other hand, the trade off was that the people who own copyrights would get an easier mechanism to have this take down procedure so that they can give a notice of take
- 18:39down and then the ISP was supposed to take down the user generated comment in order to preserve their safe harbor.
- 18:46Now,
- 18:47A lot of people disagree today with provisions of the DMCA.
- 18:52Some think it goes too far one way.
- 18:54Some think it goes too far another way.
- 18:57But the point was it was intended to be a compromise.
- 19:04So you have to think about, know, what would that compromise be here or not?
- 19:10You can also have more specific legislation if we want to go back to the internet thing in the sense that there were uh
- 19:17the Anti-Cyber-Scotting Consumer Protection Act, which was really specific to deal with fraudulent people misusing domain names and the names of folks like Wharton or something
- 19:31like that and causing mischief.
- 19:34You could see some parallels to that today.
- 19:36You probably know about more specific legislation like the DeepFace Fakes Act and similar things done at least right now.
- 19:47efforts made on the state level concerned about uh especially right of publicity issues, privacy issues, things like that.
- 19:58In other words, there could be broad legislation or there could be more narrow casting legislation depending on what the issues may be.
- 20:09And it could be that we end up with a broad legislative solution or a more narrow.
- 20:17legislative solution, depending on the will of Congress and how such a bill might be written.
- 20:26And you could also end up with a situation where uh the balancing, the coalition is not there and we need to have the courts spend more time.
- 20:43uh
- 20:45figuring out a solution, which may not be a bad thing because as time goes on, you learn more and you see more of the consequences.
- 20:57And sometimes you can make a better decision when you have more information about uh the potential impacts.
- 21:07So it's too early to tell though as to whether here we're going to end up with.
- 21:13em
- 21:14uh a giant legislative solution or not.
- 21:18Okay, why don't we move on to the output side?
- 21:20We've been focusing predominantly on the training question, but what are the major issues around whether a work created with genera.ai infringes on?
- 21:31So many cases that have been brought that are input cases that are complaining about the training are also output cases because it's kind of hard to have the outputs be similar
- 21:46and this would be your output, you're letting users come up with things that are substantially similar.
- 21:53That's the magic phrase for copyright infringement if the works are substantially similar.
- 21:59So that the idea is that the outputs, the photographs or the song lyrics or the book or whatever is substantially similar to my copyrighted work.
- 22:11Sometimes the training needs to have been fed in with that material for the outputs to do that, although not necessarily.
- 22:20So the output cases uh focus much more on, hey, I'm being harmed because
- 22:28Instead of coming to me, copyright holder, for my photograph, my character, whatever it is, a user is able to type in what they want and get that image and they don't have to
- 22:44come to me for a license or hire a graphic designer or someone like that for that purpose.
- 22:51And most recently, very recently, this week from when we're talking, Disney
- 22:56Ununiversal filed a lawsuit against Mid Journey, which is one of the AI platforms that helps to create uh visuals.
- 23:06It's not a text focus, the focus is on the visuals.
- 23:09And their complaint had all sorts of images of Elsa and other princesses that were generated using Mid Journey or Marvel superheroes and Simpsons characters and
- 23:25and the like, and the concern was, hey, you're using my IP improperly.
- 23:32And this is the first time the movie studios have really come together to file a lawsuit like this.
- 23:40it's already gotten a lot of attention in the newspaper.
- 23:43So we're gonna have to see how it plays out, but that's what the input cases focus on.
- 23:51With that, though, just to be clear, is that there's uh the different AI platforms vary somewhat.
- 24:01Some of them have put in place guidelines to try to prevent the ability for a user to come up with something that looks like a copyrighted character or reveals too much of the text
- 24:16of a book or of a particular article or something like that.
- 24:21Others feel that, no, that shouldn't be their obligation and they shouldn't have to do that.
- 24:29It's the user that put in that request.
- 24:33It's not their responsibility.
- 24:36People who are on the side of the platforms will often argue something called volitional conduct.
- 24:45Is it really volitional conduct?
- 24:48If I'm the one, the user who's typing something in saying, me X, uh they'll say that I'm not really responsible for that.
- 24:56Others would say, on the other hand, well, you set it all up that they can do this by part of what you train.
- 25:03So you are responsible.
- 25:05So those are going to be some of things that are going to uh be dealt with in some of these cases.
- 25:13And this issue of to what extent uh
- 25:17there should be guardrails or not uh is something that you're seeing litigated more and more.
- 25:26For example, in one of these music cases I mentioned, the Concord case, initially there was a preliminary injunction filed and trying to get certain guardrails in place, but they
- 25:37reached an agreement that the platform would put in certain guardrails that would make it
- 25:45harder for people to get, for example, song lyrics, in which case the court said, the motion's now mute, moo, because people have agreed to this.
- 25:53And there'll be a debate, and the cases are going to try to figure out, as I said, to what degree is the platform responsible for what the users do.
- 26:05And there'll be a debate as to whether there should or shouldn't be these kind of guardrails with regard to uh limiting.
- 26:14what people can ultimately see.
- 26:19Is this going to be a similarly fact-specific kind of inquiry?
- 26:22Because even if there are guardrails, there are lots of examples you can find online or you can probably find yourself with some of these tools where you type in and say, give me
- 26:32Elsa from Frozen, and it says, I can't do that.
- 26:34And then you say, give me a princess who looks like this, and so forth, and you can circumvent.
- 26:40So does it inevitably have to be a very specific inquiry about what's enough?
- 26:48I, as any lawyer would say, it depends, right?
- 26:55And because again, you can understand that part of it will depend legally on the thought about the, to some degree, this volitional conduct idea.
- 27:07But the other thing is if ever some of these cases get to a jury, juries may have to decide credibility issues,
- 27:19responsibility issues and issues relating to uh how similar it is because uh people could disagree as to whether something really is a recognizable character or not.
- 27:39There's things like scenes of fair, certain tropes are available for everyone to use.
- 27:44uh On the other hand,
- 27:46It's the same coloring and same hair and same design and same eyes and is returned by a specific choice to that.
- 27:54oh That makes it a little bit harder for someone to say it isn't a copy of that image.
- 28:02And then the last major scenario I just want to ask you about is uh the question about whether a general AI work itself is entitled to copyright protection.
- 28:10And as I understand it, the copyright was just said if it's, there's no human involvement at all, you just push a button, no.
- 28:15But what's the line beyond that where there's enough human involvement?
- 28:20This is where I think that the law is starting to develop so people are starting to understand how it's supposed to work.
- 28:28You're absolutely right, and this was in yet a different copyright office circular guideline that they report, the three reports we were talking about that came out.
- 28:40And it did talk about the idea that generally speaking, the concept is if the
- 28:46artwork or article or whatever it is was all created by AI, then that can't be copyrightable.
- 28:54But the issue is it could be copyrightable if there was sufficient human involvement.
- 29:01And then everyone's trying to figure out, what does that mean?
- 29:04Well, you go back and you look at some cases and you can start to figure it out.
- 29:08There was a Thaler case which went all the way up to the DC circuit where someone really wanted to make the
- 29:15point, he was really trying to say that AI should be allowed to copyright things.
- 29:22And the court said, no, you're admitting that there was no human involvement.
- 29:27So that's not good enough.
- 29:28And to be clear, the Copyright Office report that I mentioned said that the level of human involvement can't just be in coming up with prompts.
- 29:37It has to be actually some act of creation beyond coming up
- 29:44Well, then you compare the Thaler case with the Zariah the Dawn uh case involving a graphic novel.
- 29:53And I think that really tells you a lot about it's a good practical guidance.
- 29:58Let's put it that way for those of us advising clients on this, because originally uh this person had created a graphic novel, Zariah the Dawn, and they got a copyright registration
- 30:11for it.
- 30:11She did.
- 30:12Well, then.
- 30:13uh it was revealed to the Copyright Office that the graphic novel, the visuals to it at least, had been created by Mid Journey, that same company that we were talking about a
- 30:25minute ago.
- 30:25And that she wrote the text and she arranged the material uh into a graphic novel, but the actual visuals were not something that she had created.
- 30:39In which case, they amended the Copyright Office
- 30:42uh registration to say that she had a copyright in the text and she had a copyright in the selection and arrangement of the text to the pictures.
- 30:52In other words, she did the creative work of putting it all together into a graphic novel.
- 30:59But the actual images that were generated by many detailed text prompts asking the majority to create X, Y, and Z wasn't something that could be owned.
- 31:12by themselves.
- 31:14So I think that what you're seeing from that is at least how copyright could be used to say if it's pure AI, no, but you can still protect a lot because there's still a lot of
- 31:30human involvement and what the humans do with the material that's created by AI.
- 31:38that seems to be getting
- 31:41more clarity compared to some of these other issues.
- 31:48uh Both the content owners and AI companies and those that are advocating for them tend to make statements that these are existential issues, how these cases come out.
- 32:02How much of a business impact is it really um on either side, whether there's infringement in these kinds of cases?
- 32:11Well, it could have a huge impact depending on what the use is and depending on what the business is.
- 32:17Something could go to the core of what that business does.
- 32:22And when I say that business, that could be on both sides, the core of what the AI business is trying to do and the core of what the copyright creator type of business do.
- 32:34So it could have a big impact on both, which is why
- 32:39Sometimes when there's a lot of risk for either or both sides, you end up with settlements.
- 32:47And certainly you're seeing, if not settlements, but you're reading it out in the press, different licensing schemes being agreed to.
- 32:58There was, think, the New York Times recently did a deal, I think, with Amazon and there's other.
- 33:07as I already mentioned, at least some, not settlement, but some agreement on some of the guidelines in the Concord case.
- 33:15So you're seeing that there could be an incentive to try to work out a resolution in some cases that's a compromise for everyone.
- 33:27uh But sometimes that compromise is not very happy.
- 33:35Sometimes it could uh still end up killing the golden goose on either side or not be commercially uh sensible.
- 33:47And once had a court that uh was urging me to, you know, both the parties to settle and it wasn't an AI case or anything like that.
- 33:58But I said, well, Your Honor, that would be like having us uh lose money on every sale.
- 34:05but make it up on volume, which if you think about, you really can't do it that way.
- 34:12So it has to work from a dollars and cents point of view.
- 34:18Lawyers do tend to be extreme and make uh dramatic arguments.
- 34:26Sometimes there's a reason though to do so.
- 34:29Sometimes the consequences could be dramatic for
- 34:34both sides of the equation.
- 34:36And I'm not in any way minimizing that.
- 34:41But it sounds like from the tenor of the conversation that you're, am I right to say broadly optimistic that through some combination of litigation, maybe some legislation,
- 34:50these private resolution of disputes that will ultimately navigate through these complexities.
- 34:58Yes.
- 34:59And why?
- 35:00Well, again, what's past is prologue.
- 35:03You started off by asking, doesn't technology change?
- 35:07And yes, it does.
- 35:08And there have been lots of new innovations and they'll probably be even more innovations.
- 35:14mean, who thought that we'd be living in a world you can have this amazing computer that you carry around with you that's also a camera and all sorts of other kinds of things.
- 35:24mean, the technology.
- 35:26changes all the time and I'm not as uh inclined to uh run around like Chicken Little and say the sky is falling.
- 35:37But I do think that it's uh useful to remember that there are ardently well-reasoned, thoughtful lawyers and companies on both sides of this debate and
- 35:55given facts of different cases, different oxes that have been, or wrongs that have been uh done, you could see a situation where one size doesn't fit all in all cases as to whether
- 36:13something is fair or not fair, whether it's infringement or not infringement.
- 36:19And what I think is really important is for people to listen to one another.
- 36:25to try to come up with best practices and uh a path going forward that protects the tremendous, wonderful innovation on, I'm not even gonna say both sides of this debate, I'm
- 36:42gonna say all sides of this debate because I think it's a table with uh many sides.
- 36:52That's a great place to end.
- 36:52Dale, thank you so much for your time.
- 36:55It's always a pleasure.
- 36:56Thanks for being interested.
- 36:57Take care.