Context: Before and after the New York Times Company’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft (February 29, 2024 ai fray post), well over a dozen similar U.S. cases have been filed.
What’s new: The most recent high-profile AI copyright lawsuit was filed by three authors against NVIDIA over its NeMo model (March 11, 2024 Computerworld article). On this occasion, ai fray would like to provide a simple three-page chart that visualizes the different U.S. copyright cases over AI training by connecting parties with arrows that lead through rectangular areas representing federal judicial districts.
Some AI copyright cases have already been consolidated. The most important venues are the Southern District of New York and the Northern District of California, but cases are also pending in the District of Delaware and the Middle District of Tennessee.
Some define copyright law so narrowly as to exclude claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMA) over the removal of copyright management information. Arguably, the DMCA is related to, but not strictly about, copyright enforcement. Various AI copyright cases also involve unfair competition, trademark or other claims (such as privacy).
In order to keep things simple, the following three-page diagram shows the key cases that have been brought so far (except for one that was voluntarily dismissed).
There’s this saying that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Sometimes, however, there’s nothing (or only little) more than smoke. A number of claims have already been thrown out from some of those cases, and presumably more of them will be thrown out. If the training of AI models is deemed fair use, the most important claims will be history, but it may take a while before all of this is litigated until the end. Sooner or later the Supreme Court will probably hear an AI copyright case.
Now the three-page diagram, which will be updated and may at some point span more pages if those lawsuits keep coming. First, the PDF version (one document):
And now also each of the three pages as a separate image:
