iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Perhaps the only bright side is that there’s also not much they can say that would make this case necessarily influential for all of the other cases pending elsewhere around the country.

000

We will see what the court’s opinion actually says by way of justification, but there is really nothing they can say that would render this outcome reasonable under current copyright doctrine, or desirable as a policy outcome.

100

The kind of industrious collection and sweat of the brow work represented by West and the headnote system, by contrast, is exactly the kind of work that Copyright has never protected.

100

Creating new useful tools that make public domain information more publicly accessible is the kind of thing praised by courts in cases like Feist and Google Books.

100

The kind of competition that Ross would have brought to the marketplace is exactly the competition that Copyright law seeks to foster through doctrines like the fact-expression, and idea-expression dichotomies, and of course, through fair use.

100

It leaves in place a toxic oligopoly of legal research titans, who have built an empire by locking up the law and selling it back to us.

100

This case should have been lost on copyrightability before it ever got to the question of fair use. Third, the outcome is obviously terrible policy.

100

The goal of headnotes is not to express anything at all, but rather to capture and reproduce as accurately as possible, already existing public domain expressions, facts and ideas.

West headnotes are just robotic restatements of public domain judicial opinions. They are the textual equivalent of the three-dimensional car scans in the meshwerks case.

100

Second, Ross should’ve won. The raw material they copied in the process of training their AI tool wasn’t really expressive content at all.

100

First, as @AdamEisgrau has articulated, there are ways for the other AI cases to distinguish themselves from this one. The products are different. The process is different. The market dynamics are different. This is hardly a bellwether for the future of fair use in the domain of AI.

100

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

113

Web Scraping Is Not a Crime – The Markup

I'm not the only one saying this. Web scraping has been a key method in some of the most important accountability journalism of this century. Check out this interview with @JuliaAngwin.com and @nabi.bsky.social about their amicus brief in defense of scraping: themarkup.org/newsletter/...

themarkup.org

Hello, friends, This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that is very close to our hearts …

120

Condé Nast, Hearst among 300 media execs to push federal ‘bad bots’ bill on AI scraping

According to this story, it sounds like the bill is the result of these bigwigs talking to Congress at their last fly-in, and legislators asking them to come up with legislation they could rally around to show they were 'doing something' about 'bad bots.' digiday.com/media/conde...

digiday.com

More than 300 publishing execs are heading to D.C. to push Congress to crack down on AI bots that scrape their content without permission.

100

Over 300 news execs are flying to DC today to tell Congress to kneecap anonymous tools that reporters need to hold powerful people (like big news publishers) accountable. They're pushing the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act to get an AI windfall, even if it makes crucial journalism about the web illegal.

Re:Create Coalition @recreatecoalition.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Reposted by Brandon Butler

Today, Re:Create Executive Director @bb.usefairuse.com sent a letter to Senate Leadership outlining key concerns regarding H.R. 10204. Read the full letter here:

recreatecoalition.org

Re:Create Raises Concerns in Letter about H.R. 10204 - Re:Create

022

Brandon Butler @bb.usefairuse.com · 25/09/2026

When Chairman Issa's siteblocking bill dropped with a thud last week, Big Content was eerily quiet about it. Turns out it wasn't draconian enough for them - they wanted a bill with even less protection for the public, and here it is: the "DEFEND IP Act." NOPE.

021

Reporters revisiting the study in light of this litigation news should also read Cooper’s substantive critiques, as it shows this is not just a gotcha game about money. The study has real flaws that consistently bias its analysis in favor of the funder.

081

Playing Whack-a-Mole with misconceptions about memorization, extraction, and copyright

This all comes after A. Feder Cooper, a respected researcher on AI and hardly a shill for the AI companies, leveled serious substantive critiques of the study, including a subtle reference to Chakrabarty’s funding: afedercooper.info/whack-a-mole/

afedercooper.info

A response to Alignment Whack-a-Mole and some broader thoughts on the field

162

If you reported on that study about the alleged market effect of AI use on self-published Amazon books, you may want to update your story. @WillOremus @sashrogel @xanalter

141

As OpenAI’s brief observes, at the same time that the class action attorneys were trying to get the study into court, the authors of the study were getting into the press. Writers for the NYTimes, the Atlantic, and other outlets reported out the study, w/o the funding context.

150

Plaintiffs tried to get this study in at the last minute by laundering it through another expert witness, and when that witness was asked whether Sussman had funded the study, he said he didn’t think so. The Sussman lawyer defending the deposition didn’t correct him.

150

Brandon Butler @bb.usefairuse.com · 22/09/2026

OpenAI’s attorneys dropped a bombshell brief yesterday informing the court that the allegedly neutral scientific study of market effects submitted by the plaintiffs in their class action suit had actually been funded by the plaintiffs’ law firm, Sussman Godfrey. (Link below)

196

I like Wordle as much as the next guy, but it's no substitute for reliable reporting on the City Council or the School Board. These lawsuits won't help support the local journalists doing that work; it will give a windfall to the national outlets eating their lunch and stripping them for parts.

000

Brandon Butler @bb.usefairuse.com · 22/09/2026

In addition, by crushing, crippling, or driving up the cost of the AI tools already in use at many local papers, the big news oligarchs would strip them of powerful newsgathering and reporting capabilities.

Local newsrooms utilize AI tools to enhance reporting capabilities amid rising costs and licensing issues that threaten their resources.

Brandon Butler @bb.usefairuse.com · 22/09/2026

Pointing to arguments in the Dept. of Justice's Statement of Interest, RSI's Spence Purnell points out that a win for these national titans will only further consolidate the market for news and information, at the expense of local outlets.

Spence Purnell highlights the decline of local news in the U.S. and the impact of large national outlets on smaller ones.

100

Why some musicians aren't happy about labels signing AI deals with platforms

Watch these disputes: they're evidence of what we've warned about, that giving the copyright oligopolies a windfall from AI has little to do with helping actual creators. It's a gold-rush for big media and trickle-down economics for working artists. www.latimes.com/entertainme...

latimes.com

Record labels that sued AI music companies are now licensing them. But payouts are undisclosed, lawsuits continue and musicians ask who benefits.

073

As @joemullin explains, the court recognized that creating a new work with genAI is not the same as making a copy. So when a genAI tool outputs code that might include a snippet that matches the training data, that output is not a "copy" that has CMI "removed" - it's a new work.

Happily, the 9th Circuit avoided disaster, siding with Github, @EFF and other amici who had urged the court to be reasonable in applying the law about CMI. While the court avoided deciding the core question about training, it repudiated the Does' dumbest argument.

130

It's stupid to apply this rule to AI training and other computational fair uses because removal of CMI is an important part of non-consumptive textual analysis. It's got nothing to do with facilitating piracy - the copies never see the light of day!

100

As part of its package of anti-piracy measures, the DMCA includes a provision that says you can't remove CMI from a copy of a protected work. The goal was to penalize pirates who would strip out watermarks or other markings that rightsholders use to indicate their ownership.

100

We've been watching the 9th Cir to see what they would say about "Copyright Management Information" (CMI), a weird quasi-copyright thing from the DMCA that may be a dark horse candidate for most stupid copyright law to apply to AI (a tight race!).

100