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posted by hubie on Friday January 12 2024, @05:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-we-crush-AI-instead? dept.

Media outlets are calling foul play over AI companies using their content to build chatbots. They may find friends in the Senate:

Logo text More than a decade ago, the normalization of tech companies carrying content created by news organizations without directly paying them — cannibalizing readership and ad revenue — precipitated the decline of the media industry. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, those same firms threaten to further tilt the balance of power between Big Tech and news.

On Wednesday, lawmakers in the Senate Judiciary Committee referenced their failure to adopt legislation that would've barred the exploitation of content by Big Tech in backing proposals that would require AI companies to strike licensing deals with news organizations.

Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and chair of the committee, joined several other senators in supporting calls for a licensing regime and to establish a framework clarifying that intellectual property laws don't protect AI companies using copyrighted material to build their chatbots.

[...] The fight over the legality of AI firms eating content from news organizations without consent or compensation is split into two camps: Those who believe the practice is protected under the "fair use" doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works, and those who argue that it constitutes copyright infringement. Courts are currently wrestling with the issue, but an answer to the question is likely years away. In the meantime, AI companies continue to use copyrighted content as training materials, endangering the financial viability of media in a landscape in which readers can bypass direct sources in favor of search results generated by AI tools.

[...] A lawsuit from The New York Times, filed last month, pulled back the curtain behind negotiations over the price and terms of licensing its content. Before suing, it said that it had been talking for months with OpenAI and Microsoft about a deal, though the talks reached no such truce. In the backdrop of AI companies crawling the internet for high-quality written content, news organizations have been backed into a corner, having to decide whether to accept lowball offers to license their content or expend the time and money to sue in a lawsuit. Some companies, like Axel Springer, took the money.

It's important to note that under intellectual property laws, facts are not protected.

Also at Courthouse News Service and Axios.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday January 13 2024, @03:19AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Saturday January 13 2024, @03:19AM (#1340108)

    Facts aren't protected, but an article paragraph or sentence that records a fact is. So, for example, "The US and UK launched air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen today." can be copyrighted. But if somebody else writes "In Yemen today, the Houthis were struck by missiles from US fighters.", the writer of the first sentence can't sue the writer of the second sentence or vice versa.

    What news organizations serve up more than facts or outright fiction is commentary. Commentary bears some basis in fact, but then adds the opinion of the talking heads and ideally gets them arguing with each other. If you pay attention to a TV news broadcast, you'll often see a format that amounts to 1-2 sentences worth of facts about an issue (20 seconds), and then they introduce the commentary section with things like "And now to discuss this issue, we have ____, ____, ____, and ____" and then they shout at each other until the next commercial break (3-4 minutes). Even local news likes that format, because finding out facts about an issue is hard and expensive, writing those facts into a coherent story is only a bit easier, but commentators yelling at each other is pretty cheap and easy to do.

    And to quote a more wise talking head: "Same as it ever was".

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