Tech companies are betting that they will become so huge that copyright holders will make all efforts to reach a reasonable licensing agreement with them, because of their scale and access to VC money. Until now, they have been proven right. Who looses? Everybody else.

"OpenAI has lost a key discovery battle over internal communications related to the startup deleting two huge datasets of pirated books, a development that further tilts the scales in favor of authors suing the company.

To rewind, authors and publishers have gained access to Slack messages between OpenAI’s employees discussing the erasure of the datasets, named “books 1 and books 2.” But the court held off on whether plaintiffs should get other communications that the company argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

In a controversial decision that was appealed by OpenAI on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ona Wang found that OpenAI must hand over documents revealing the company’s motivations for deleting the datasets. OpenAI’s in-house legal team will be deposed.

At stake: Billions of dollars and, potentially, OpenAI’s defense in the case. The communications could help prove what’s known as “willful” infringement, which triggers significantly higher damages of $150,000 per work. And if it’s found that the company destroyed the evidence with potential litigation in mind, the court could direct juries in later trials to assume it would’ve been unfavorable for OpenAI.

The discovery ruling bolsters what’s increasingly looking like a winning argument over the practice of pirating books from shadow libraries. That theory has changed over the course of AI litigation. At first, lawyers for the authors directly connected the piracy to OpenAI’s training of its models under a single umbrella. But later, they separated the theories..."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/openai-loses-key-discovery-battle-why-deleted-library-of-pirated-books-1236436363/

#Copyright #IP #OpenAI #AI #AITraining #GenerativeAI #IntellectualMonopolies

"Why do these solutions fall so short? Because many of these copyright lawsuits, licensing solutions and digital replica rights are Trojan horses, inside of which sits big content. The Copyright Alliance, an influential non-profit advocating for the interests of the “copyright community”, argues for strong copyright solutions to generative AI. While it claims to “advocate for individual creators”, its board of directors is stacked with industry executives from media giants such as Paramount, NBC Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

But why all the fanfare of coalition-building when the entertainment industry could just quietly pocket billions in deals with tech companies? Because big content needs artists. Its media empires need artists’ labour to profit, its lobbying needs artist support to seem legitimate and its new AI business partners need artists’ art.

This fact points to a strategy that entertainment executives fear far more than AI, one that would empower artists to challenge the status quo across big content and big tech: organised labour. Unionised creative workers, such as those in the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, have secured meaningful protections against AI through strikes and collective bargaining. Copyright is a tool too antiquated, too static and too indelicate to bear the task of deciding the future of an already precarious creative labour force. If big content truly cared about protecting artists from AI, it would stop trying to sell their voices as training data and start listening to them."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/15/big-content-ai-entertainment-media-conglomerates-tech

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigContent #BigTech #Monopolies #Copyright #IP #IntellectualMonopolies #Rentism

"As all things old are new again, a bill that would make obtaining bad patents easier and harder to challenge is being considered in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced.

PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas. While Alice has not completely solved the problems of the patent system or patent trolling, it has led to the rejection of hundreds of low-quality software patents and, as a result, has allowed innovation and small businesses to grow."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/pera-remains-serious-threat-efforts-against-bad-patents

#USA #Patents #PERA #IP #IntellectualMonopolies #PatentTrolls

#BigTech #MonopolyPower #IntellectualMonopolies #Capitalism: "Despite the knocks to their shares in late 2022 with the end of quantitative easing, the tech giants remain a dominant feature of the 21st-century scene. Indeed, it is striking that all the firms that did well in 2022—Big Oil and Big Pharma, as well as Big Tech—have one thing in common: they all exercise monopoly power over other firms. Where they differ is in what they control—what they deprive others of—which has important implications: those that systematically monopolize knowledge and data exert a global exclusion which makes them more resilient. What follows will examine the novel nature of Big Tech’s monopoly power, the factors that have given rise to it and the mechanisms used to enforce its hold over other firms. I will look in particular at the case of Microsoft, which jostles with Apple and Aramco in the top three corporations by market value. But first, some more general considerations about monopoly power may be in order."

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii139/articles/capitalism-as-usual