While calling voice a protected right, court dismisses voice actor's AI case TikTok argued in the case that the person who posted the videos let generative AI learn their friend's voice, and it is no more than a generic male voice. The Tokyo District Court on Wednesday dismissed a demand from a high-profile anime voice actor that TikTok remove videos he says feature an artificial intelligence clone of his voice but recognized voice as a protected right. While Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi ruled that voice is also subject to what is known as publicity rights -- celebrities' right to control and protect commercial gain from their identity, such as their name and image -- she dismissed Kenjiro Tsuda's demand, saying the videos had already been deleted. "Human voice is a symbol of an individual's personality, just like image," the ruling said, adding that unauthorized use of voice could constitute an infringement of rights. It is the first time a Japanese court made such a judgment.

Hollywood and ByteDance have seemingly squashed their beef revolving around AI models infringing on studios' intellectual property. The MPA, whose members include Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, said that "this agreement represents significant cooperation between the two organizations." The trade association even added that ByteDance's latest release of Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5 reflect its "continued advances in IP protections." According to the press release, this memorandum applies to all AI models from ByteDance, including those used on TikTok, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, CapCut and Dreamina. Shortly after, ByteDance responded by pledging it would strengthen its safeguards around unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness, even later reportedly suspending Seedance 2.0's global rollout.

It also alleges that Google "downloaded web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and from behind legitimate paywalls". It further alleges that Google copied those works without permission to train its AI models and continues to do so, despite those uses allegedly falling outside the scope of existing agreements. The suit claims the company was fully aware of the legal risks, alleging that internal documents warned using books to train AI models was "highly problematic for Google," and could lead to as much as $100bn in fines. "At no point did Google inform authors and publishers that Google was copying their works as source material to develop and train AI models," the suit alleges. "It's an interesting issue that has a lot of complex dimensions, in no small part because it can be hard to prove what was or wasn't in a training corpus."

It's the latest in a barrage of efforts to win compensation from AI companies over training materials. Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier are the plaintiff companies and writer Scott Turow is the individual behind this effort . Yet Google has failed to implement effective guardrails. The literary world has made several attempts to make deals with the AI companies that have scraped and trained large language models off of their protected works. In fact, a group including several of the same parties already have a similar class action suit underway against Meta .

Complainants claim that their works on Google Play Books were not licensed for use in training Gemini. Complainants claim that their works on Google Play Books were not licensed for use in training Gemini. The case, filed in federal court in New York, has been brought by three publishers - Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier - and bestselling American author Scott Turow. The publishers argue that Google repurposed books that had been supplied for limited services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar. Those services allowed Google to use the works in specific ways - for example, to display searchable snippets or sell ebooks - but not, the lawsuit claims, to copy them for training commercial AI products.

They define near access-freeness (NAF) and propose it as sufficient for protection.

The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday, claims that the AI company unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN's content from CNN Digital Platforms and third-party platforms. It also accuses the AI tools of reproducing verbatim copies of its articles, including paywalled stories, in query responses to users. Perplexity's AI tools allegedly have incorrectly attributed hallucinated content to CNN, which the company says in the suit violates its trademark. CNN's lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits, a CNN spokesperson said in a statement to the outlet. The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce.

Chinese technology giant ByteDance has pledged to curb a controversial artificial intelligence (AI) video-making tool, following threats of legal action from Disney and complaints from other entertainment giants. In the last few days, videos made using the latest version of the app Seedance have proliferated online. Many have been lauded for their realism. Disney's lawyers accused ByteDance of committing a virtual smash-and-grab of their intellectual property, including superheroes from Marvel, Star Wars and various cartoons. On Monday ByteDance told the BBC that the company respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0.

A cease-and-desist letter accuses the search giant's AI tools of training on and copying protected works. The letter includes examples of images from several Disney properties including Deadpool, Moana, Star Wars and others, reproduced by Google's AI tools. Disney is demanding that Google implement guardrails within all its AI products to prevent further infringement. Today Disney with OpenAI to license its characters for use in Sora, OpenAI's video generator. The deal will see Disney invest $1 billion in OpenAI (a paltry sum by), with the option to purchase additional equity at a later date.

Both publications claim the AI company scraped their works for LLM training and often reproduced their content verbatim. The said it had sent Perplexity several cease-and-desist demands to stop using its content until the two reached an agreement, but the AI company persisted in doing so. First, by scraping its website (including in real time) to train AI models and feed content into the likes of the Claude chatbot and Comet browser . The also says Perplexity damaged its brand by falsely attributing completely fabricated information (aka hallucinations) to the newspaper. The also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for similar reasons.