Tag: Copyrights and Copyright Violations

When Private Equity Came for the Music Industry

Does that song on your phone or on the radio or in the movie theater sound familiar? Private equity — the industry responsible for bankrupting companies, slashing jobs and raising the mortality rates at the nursing homes it acquires — is making money by gobbling up the rights for old hits and pumping them back […]

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Sony Reaches Blockbuster Deal for Michael Jackson’s Catalog

Sony has agreed to acquire half of Michael Jackson’s catalog from the star’s estate, in what is likely the richest transaction ever for a single musician’s work, according to two people briefed on the agreement. The deal, which has been gossiped about in the music industry for months, is said to involve Sony purchasing a […]

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TikTok Lost Universal’s Huge Music Catalog. What Happened?

TikTok users woke up Thursday and discovered that many videos using songs by stars like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Drake and Ariana Grande had gone silent, after a public brawl between TikTok and Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company. It was a startling turn of events for the app’s creators and users, […]

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Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok

Videos on TikTok began to go silent early Thursday, after combative licensing negotiations broke down this week between the popular social media platform and Universal Music Group, the giant company that releases music by Taylor Swift, Drake, U2, Ariana Grande and many other stars whose songs have been key to TikTok’s rapid growth around the […]

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The Sleepy Copyright Office in the Middle of a High-Stakes Clash Over A.I.

For decades, the Copyright Office has been a small and sleepy office within the Library of Congress. Each year, the agency’s 450 employees register roughly half a million copyrights, the ownership rights for creative works, based on a two-centuries-old law. In recent months, however, the office has suddenly found itself in the spotlight. Lobbyists for […]

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Phantom Artists Stole Their Songs. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.

The guys in Bad Dog, a folkie duo from Washington, D.C., weren’t hoping to get rich off the album they recorded this summer. David Post and Craig Blackwell have been devoted amateurs for decades, and they’re long past dreams of tours and limos. Mostly they wanted a CD to give away at a house party […]

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OpenAI Says New York Times Lawsuit Against It Is ‘Without Merit’

OpenAI said on Monday that a New York Times lawsuit against it was “without merit” and that it supported and created opportunities for news organizations, as it waded further into a debate over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing the […]

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Israel’s Landmark Ruling, and a Mickey Mouse Copyright Expires

The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists […]

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These Classic Characters Are Losing Copyright Protection. They May Never Be the Same.

Hey, 1928 called. It wants all of these back: Then there’s J.M. Barrie’s stage version of “Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” the D.H. Lawrence novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography,” Wanda Gág’s picture book, “Millions of Cats,” and many more. (For a full list, see here.) “I’m pretty […]

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Boom in A.I. Prompts a Test of Copyright Law

The boom in artificial intelligence tools that draw on troves of content from across the internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law. Authors and a leading photo agency have brought suit over the past year, contending that their intellectual property was illegally used to train A.I. systems, which can produce humanlike prose […]

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An Artist in Residence on A.I.’s Territory

At a reception for OpenAI’s first developer conference in San Francisco last month, a crowd mingled, wine in hand, as withering criticism of art created with artificial intelligence flashed on a blue wall at the front of the room. “I’ve seen more engaging art from a malfunctioning printer,” one critic jabbed. “The fine-art equivalent of […]

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Inside the News Industry’s Uneasy Negotiations With OpenAI

For months, some of the biggest players in the U.S. media industry have been in confidential talks with OpenAI on a tricky issue: the price and terms of licensing their content to the artificial intelligence company. The curtain on those negotiations was pulled back this week when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft […]

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New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use of Copyrighted Work

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular […]

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Tolkien Estate Wins Court Order to Destroy Fan’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Sequel

It was supposed to be what a fan described as a “loving homage” to his hero, the author J.R.R. Tolkien, and to “The Lord of the Rings,” which he called “one of the most defining experiences of his life.” A judge in California had another view. The fan, Demetrious Polychron of Santa Monica, Calif., violated […]

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Hard Fork: Casey Goes to the White House + The Copyright Battle Over A.I. + HatGPT

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. kevin roose Casey, I want to talk this week on the show about a technology that is dangerous and […]

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News Group Says A.I. Chatbots Heavily Rely on News Content

News publishers have argued for the past year that A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT rely on copyrighted articles to power the technology. Now the publishers say developers of these tools disproportionately use news content. The News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents more than 2,200 publishers, including The New York Times, released research on Tuesday […]

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Executive Order on A.I. Tries to Balance Technology’s Potential and Peril

How do you regulate something that has the potential to both help and harm people, that touches every sector of the economy and that is changing so quickly even the experts can’t keep up? That has been the main challenge for governments when it comes to artificial intelligence. Regulate A.I. too slowly and you might […]

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At New York Comic Con, New Publisher Hopes to Shake Up Industry

Brad Meltzer has experience with ownership in publishing. “As a novelist, I own my characters. I always have,” he said. Mr. Meltzer has written dozens of thrillers, including “The Escape Artist” and “The Book of Lies,” as well as books for children and comic books. He’s also no stranger to television: He was a creator […]

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Lina Khan vs. Amazon

The Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, has brought her long-awaited, audacious case against Amazon, signaling the Biden administration’s determination to restore an approach to competition law that has been in decline since the Carter administration. This will doubtless draw fresh criticism about her supposed overreach. But Amazon is precisely the kind of company that […]

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This Is How A.I. Ruins the Internet

Greg Marston, a British voice actor, recently came across “Connor” online — an A.I.-generated clone of his voice, trained on a recording Mr. Marston had made in 2003. It was his voice uttering things he had never said. Back then, he had recorded a session for IBM and later signed a release form allowing the […]

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Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI

A group of prominent novelists, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand, are joining the legal battle against OpenAI over its chatbot technology, as fears about the encroachment of artificial intelligence on creative industries continue to grow. More than a dozen authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday, accusing the company, which has […]

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