• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 8 hours ago

If you have a child on their way to law school, here’s a tip. Tell them to go into copyright law—AI related copyright law. There’s no shortage of cases.  

In a two-day period last week, the search company Perplexity was sued by the Center for Investigative Reporting, owner of Mother Jones, and by the New York Times. 

Both the Times and Chicago Tribune accuse Perplexity of copyright infringement. The Times claims that it had contacted Perplexity several times asking that the firm stop using Times content until the firms negotiated an agreement, the Times report. 

Of course, Licensing deals would be one way of resolving these issues short of a trial and lengthy discovery. Perplexity already has arrangements with several publishers. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI is also keeping its lawyers busy. It recently was sued by U.S. News & World Report, and this case reportedly have been consolidated with those of the Times and other plaintiffs. 

U.S. News & World Report “joins the long and growing list of creators and publishers of original reporting, commentary, and analysis, who have been the victims of OpenAI’s insatiable need for popular, well-crafted, authoritative, factual, and up-to-date content,” the company states in its complaint. 

One difference between this case and some others is that U.S. News & World Report “has also developed a unique niche in the publishing world with its famous rankings publications.” And while this is not unusual among publishers, the rankings and other forms of content carry contextually relevant advertising that produces revenue. 

Despite all that, you can can expect very robust opposition by the powerful companies being sued. 

Meanwhile, a new system has been proposed in India that would require OpenAI, Google and other AI companies to pay creators if their work is used for model training. 

This could open up a whole new area of international litigation.