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Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

(news.bloomberglaw.com)
290 points nobody9999 | 2 comments | 09 Sep 25 08:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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rideontime ◴[09 Sep 25 22:00 UTC] No.45189876[source]▶
Direct link to Judge Alsup's order: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Bartzet...

Name should sound familiar to those who follow tech law; he presided over Oracle v Google, along with Anthony Levandowski's criminal case for stealing Waymo tech for Uber.

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1. bsimpson ◴[10 Sep 25 02:44 UTC] No.45192547[source]▶
He's also the one who called bullshit when Oracle tried to claim that Java's function signatures were so novel they should be eligible for copyright. (Generally, arts are copyrightable and engineering is not - there's a creativity requirement.)

They tried to say `rangeCheck(length, start, end)` was novel. He spat back that he'd written equivalent utility functions as a hobbyist hundreds of time!

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2. kemitchell ◴[10 Sep 25 06:10 UTC] No.45193921[source]▶
Art versus engineering is a very dangerous generalization of the law. There is a creativity requirement for copyrightability, but it's an explicitly low bar. Search query "minimal degree of creativity".

The Supreme Court decision in Oracle v Google skipped over copyrightability and addressed fair use. Fair use is a legal defense, applying only in response to finding infringement, which can only be found if material's copyrightable. So the way the Supreme Court made its decision was weird, but it wasn't about the creativity requirement.