Apple ordered to pay $5.7 billion for infringing tech patents

Was there a rotten apple?

Apple plans to appeal the verdict.

"A federal jury ordered Apple to pay $5.7 billion to Taction Technology for infringing haptic vibration tech patents used in iPhones and Apple Watches, the largest patent verdict in U.S. history."

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 - Join The Flyover

Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit

Scientist accuses Anthropic of plagiarizing team’s biology work

Bad news, if confirmed!

E.g. it appears the University of Copenhagen did not release any news regarding this accusation.

"Scientist accuses Anthropic of plagiarizing team’s biology work
Anthropic said its AI agents used Claude to independently discover new enzymes it calls ARTs (array-associated reverse transcriptases) by searching gene databases.

But Copenhagen computational biologist Mario Rodríguez Mestre says he and colleagues had studied the same enzymes, which they nicknamed ‘jumbotrons,’ for four years. The team shared unpublished findings with Claude while using it for research tasks. Mestre says a key finding Anthropic credited to its AI, involving RNA molecules tied to the enzymes, matches work he says his team completed over a year earlier and had already discussed with Claude.
Anthropic responded that it found no prior published work on the ART system and that Claude was not trained on user transcripts.
The dispute echoes a similar case this month in which OpenAI claimed to have solved a math problem that mathematician Tristan Buckmaster said he had been working on using OpenAI’s models. Mestre says he is now winding down his use of Claude and moving to other AI models over concerns his research may have been used without attribution." (Data Points)

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (behind paywall)

Anthropic sued (again) for training on song lyrics and US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material

What is the training of large models on copyrighted material (intellectual property)? Fair use or pirating? This answer to this question becomes very urgent.

The statutory damages asked for by plaintiffs could easily bankrupt Anthropic or any other company involved in model training.

I again strongly suggest to reform intellectual property rights. They are effective for way too many years! E.g. books and songs in the US, they "last for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years." (Google search) This is insane!!!

"In a lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI, the Trump administration has contributed a 20-page brief in defense of the ChatGPT maker’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs.

“The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally… As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,’” the brief reads, referencing an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year. ..."

"Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic, along with CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging Claude was trained on tens of thousands of copyrighted songs without permission. The complaint accuses Anthropic of torrenting pirated books from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, scraping lyrics from licensed sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and running a “destructive scanning” operation on physical books, citing findings already unsealed in the separate Bartz v. Anthropic authors’ case. The publishers seek statutory damages up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work plus up to $25,000 per removed copyright notice, destruction of infringing copies, and disclosure of Claude’s training data.
This is the fifth major music-industry suit against Anthropic, following actions from Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, and ABKCO (over $3 billion), BMG, and Round Hill Music.
It also follows Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book authors over similar torrenting conduct, announced in 2025 and approved this year. The suit signals that music publishers are pushing for damages and licensing terms rather than accepting a one-time settlement. ..." (DataPoints)

Now Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic in multi-billion dollar lawsuit: ‘One of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.’

US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material | TechCrunch

US threatens sanctions against Chinese AI models over IP theft

Good news! 

I blogged here about a recent claim of a Chinese cloning attack or was it distillation.

"On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. would examine open source models from China for signs of intellectual property theft, threatening sanctions against Chinese AI companies if IP theft is established. 

“We’ve seen a lot of talk about open source models coming and threatening the large language models in the U.S.,” Bessent said on Fox Business Tuesday. “This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.” ..."

US threatens sanctions against Chinese AI models over IP theft | TechCrunch

Fixing US Patent Eligibility Is an Easy Win for Innovation

How serious is the situation? Will the latest legislation improve things?

"America was the first country to recognize copyrights and patents in its constitution, and industries built on intellectual property produce over 40 percent of US GDP whilst supporting tens of millions of jobs.

Now, however, a handful of Supreme Court decisions have excluded entire categories of invention from patentability. US investment in diagnostic technologies fell $9.3 billion below expected levels, as a result of depriving American innovators of rights and protections enjoyed by their counterparts in Asia and Europe. 

In one much-cited example, a molecular diagnostics company developed non-invasive prenatal testing that allowed fetal DNA to be collected from the mother’s blood, replacing invasive in-utero testing that risks pregnancy loss. The judge called it a “meritorious invention” but was compelled to invalidate patents because the circulating DNA is a natural phenomenon, and the test was well understood. The discovery was beyond the reach of patent eligibility. Competitors were immediately empowered to duplicate the technique.

The result has been a decline in innovation, ceding America’s global leadership in critical areas like medical diagnostics to our foreign partners and rivals. The bipartisan Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2025 (PERA) attempts to rectify this by clarifying what inventions can be protected under the US Patent Act Section 101. PERA is before the Senate Judiciary Committee and would define clear statutory exceptions to patentable subject matter that would replace broad and vague judge-made exceptions.  ..."

Fixing Patent Eligibility Is an Easy Win for Innovation | The Daily Economy "Restrictive patent eligibility has pushed investment in key technologies overseas, weakening one of America’s historic competitive advantages. Congress can still reverse course."

Anthropic says Chinese Alibaba must be punished for largest Claude cloning attack

Serious stuff! China has long been accused of allowing the stealing of intellectual property!

"Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic’s leading model following Mythos’ release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. ..."

Anthropic says Alibaba must be punished for largest Claude cloning attack - Ars Technica "Alibaba allegedly used 25,000 accounts to mine Claude over 28.8 million exchanges."

Seedance Row: Hollywood Studios Take on Bytedance Over AI Videos with Palki Sharma

Recommendable!

(234) Seedance Row: Hollywood Studios Take on Bytedance Over AI Videos | Vantage with Palki Sharma - YouTube

Betty Boop is now in the public domain after 95 years

Reminder: Western copyrights are excessive! In this case of a cartoon character it was 95 years! Insane!

Possibly, boop (low pitched noise) was not a sexualized word some 100 years ago like e.g. boobs today or was it? Just wondering.

Source

Credits: The Flyover

Who has the legal burden of filtering copyrighted materials before large language models are trained on gigantic datasets

This legal question becomes more and more pressing! In the name of human progress, the courts in Western countries need to clarify this legal issue fast.

As a classical liberal, I argue that the copyright protections for authors are in effect way too long in Western countries. I bet many people do not know about it! According to Google e.g.: "In Germany, copyright protection generally lasts for the author's entire life plus 70 years after their death, aligning with EU standards". I am all for reducing these outrageous copyrights!

It appears various authors are trying to pick the most low hanging fruits and most lucrative options to make their legal claims. How dishonest is that? Are the authors greedy?

If e.g. (pirated?) illegal copies of copyrighted works are on the Internet freely available to anyone in many cases for years, why did these authors not prevent it?

"A new lawsuit filed by authors including John Carreyrou targets Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, alleging the companies trained large language models on pirated copies of their books. The complaint argues that prior relief—namely the Anthropic $1.5 billion settlement offering roughly $3,000 per eligible writer—fails to address the “massive willful infringement” of using stolen books to build models that generate billions in revenue. This follows a judge’s earlier ruling that while training on pirated copies may be legal under current interpretations, the underlying act of book piracy is not, leaving a gap authors want courts to address directly. ...

In a parallel suit, Adobe faces a proposed class action alleging it trained its SlimLM small language model on SlimPajama-627B, which the complaint says is a derivative of RedPajama that includes the Books3 corpus of 191,000 books. ..."

Last Week in AI #330 - Groq->Nvidia , ChatGPT Apps, US AI Genesis Mission

Stability AI largely wins UK court battle against Getty Images over copyright and trademark

Stability AI won on what appears to be a technicality used by the judge for lack of a better legal precedent/doctrine.

How useful or justified are intellectual property rights anyway?

"Getty Images largely lost its lawsuit against Stability AI in Britain’s High Court, though it narrowly won on trademark infringement claims. The image library company had accused Stability of scraping 12 million images from its website without permission to train the Stable Diffusion image generator, but Getty dropped its primary copyright claims during the trial and lost its secondary copyright arguments.

The judge ruled that Stable Diffusion doesn’t infringe copyright because it doesn’t store or reproduce copyrighted works, but said Getty’s watermark appearing on some generated images constituted trademark infringement. Legal experts say the case leaves key questions about AI training and copyright unanswered, since Getty abandoned key claims before the judge could rule on whether using copyrighted material to train AI models is lawful. Getty is pursuing a separate copyright lawsuit against Stability in U.S. federal court." (Data Points newsletter)

"... The closely followed case at Britain’s High Court was among the first in a wave of lawsuits involving generative AI as movie studios, authors and artists challenged tech companies’ use of their works to train AI chatbots.

Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images ..."

Stability AI largely wins UK court battle against Getty Images over copyright and trademark | AP News

Will AI drive reform of outdated and excessive copyrights in Western countries?

There is a good chance for this to happen! Exaggerated intellectual property rights have been a serious roadblock to progress!

E.g. in the US patents are in force for 20 years (why not 5-10 years?). Copyrights are in force for the life of the author plus 70 years (this is absolutely insane)!

"The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to attract more AI companies to the region by changing copyright law. The proposed changes would allow developers to train AI models on artists’ content found online — without permission or payment — unless creators proactively “opt out.” Not everyone is marching to the same beat, though. ..."

1,000 artists release 'silent' album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI | TechCrunch

What you need to know about the new treaty to combat biopiracy

Of course, the German government run, left leaning TV program had nothing better to do than to spread Marxian exploitation ideology!

UN Members Sign Biopiracy Treaty: End to Bogus Western Patents? with Palki Sharma

This report stinks! Biopiracy??? Yes, perhaps indigenous people knew for millennia about the healing properties of some plant, but they have never identified the active chemical and so on.

Andrew Ng proposes fair use of literature, articles etc. for the training of large language models

This seems to be a reasonable proposal! I have argued here several times before that Western copyright laws are excessive if not extreme (see e.g. here)!

These clearly long outdated Western copyright laws need to be updated, adapted etc.! Otherwise, these laws might become a serious obstacle to AI progress!

"As I [Andrew Ng] wrote previously, I believe it would be best for society if training AI models were considered fair use that did not require a license. (Whether it actually is might be a matter for legislatures and courts to decide.) Just as humans are allowed to read articles posted online, learn from them, and then use what they learn to write brand-new articles, I would like to see computers allowed to do so, too. "

XX.XX.XXXX The Batch Template

Copyright Owners Revolt against AI or the copyright conundrum

Probably most copyright laws in existence and in force are seriously outdated!

Reminder: In Western countries, copyrights are often excessive. "Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction."

"Individual copyright holders filed lawsuits against AI companies for training models on their data without obtaining explicit consent, giving credit, or providing compensation. Concurrently, formerly reliable repositories of data on the open web started to require payment or disappeared entirely. ...
Most copyright laws were written long ago. The U.S. Copyright Act was established in 1790 and was last revised in 1976! Copyright will remain a battlefield until legislators update laws for the era of generative AI."

Top Stories of 2023: Generative Everything, Doomsday Visions, Hollywood Versus AI, AI's Hit Record, Copyright Owners Revolt (by Andrew Ng)

Adobe and Microsoft offer copyright indemnification for using their generative AI apps

That is certainly a bold move in the last few months by these two companies! It emphasizes what kind of risk some companies are willing to take to make generative AI work and be profitable.

No risk, no gain!

For small and medium size businesses this appears to be a convincing proposition! However, who knows what is in the fine print.

Adobe offers copyright indemnification for Firefly AI-based image app users | Computerworld

Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers

Joint patents with China pose pitfalls in U.S.-led decoupling

Good point!

"An electric vehicle is assembled at Mazda Motor's plant in Hiroshima, Japan. Chinese curbs on technology exports could hinder the development of new EVs.

... The increasingly global nature of intellectual property development could provide Beijing some protection from the U.S.-led push to cut China out of supply chains, as companies worry about losing access to key technology in such areas as electric vehicles.

American entities jointly applied for 125 patents in China with Chinese universities or companies over the three years through 2022. Japanese-Chinese joint applications were close behind, at 115. ..."

Joint patents with China pose pitfalls in U.S.-led decoupling - Nikkei Asia American, Japanese filings on EV tech exposed to Beijing's leverage in trade battle

China’s latest Weapon to Nab Western Technology—Through Its Courts

Very concerning! Very clever by the Communist Party of China!

Courts in China is an oxymoron! They are Kangaroo courts!

"China’s courts are invalidating western tech patents" (Source)

China’s Newest Weapon to Nab Western Technology—Its Courts - WSJ Rulings nullify patents in industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals

The Wall Street Journal  apparently has been tracking this issue for some time:

How China Systematically Pries Technology From U.S. Companies (dated 9/26/2018) Beijing leans on an array of levers to extract intellectual property—sometimes coercively

U.S. Court of Appeals will soon rule if AI can legally be an inventor

AI/machine learning is still a tool, if an very advanced one. As such it can not acquire intellectual property rights like humans! Perhaps in 10-20 or more years from now this question can not be answered so simply anymore.

"The U.S. Court of Appeals heard arguments on that question again last week [early June 2022], and the ruling could affect the pace of AI technology development, particularly within the pharmaceutical and life science industries. ..."

U.S. court will soon rule if AI can legally be an 'inventor' | VentureBeat

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley Introduces Bill to Strip Walt Disney of Special Copyright Protections

I thought this U.S. Senator was smarter! Given what happened with Walt Disney in Florida this move is understandable, but it is terribly wrong!

To use intellectual property rights to target certain corporations for political reasons is very ill advised!

To uniformly shorten the excessive intellectual property rights would be a great idea to promote competition and innovation!

It appears that is what the Senator is aiming for but he packaged his message in the wrong populist way! Thereby, jeopardizing a good cause!

"... Under Congress’s current sweetheart deal, companies like Disney have been granted certain copyright protections for up to 120 years—well beyond the original maximum of 28 years. Senator Hawley’s bill would crack down on copyright monopolies to ensure they only last long enough to encourage innovation. ..."

Hawley Introduces Bill to Strip Disney of Special Copyright Protections | Senator Josh Hawley