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Good morning. The question of how AI-generated content will impact the music industry is now a new puzzle for the courts, our colleague Blake Brittain reports. Plus, a new report shows billing rates increased for lawyers during the second quarter, the DOJ is suing TikTok over youth privacy concerns, and we look at what comes next after a decision to toss the $4.7 billion NFL “Sunday Ticket” verdict. All that, and our calendar for the week! Scroll on.
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Musicians and big record labels are concerned about how AI-generated content could impact their industry – and now that concern has become a novel copyright question working its way through the courts, reports our colleague Blake Brittain.
Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music sued AI music companies Udio and Suno in June, claiming the companies copied music without permission to teach their systems to create music that will “directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out” human artists’ work. Suno and Udio have denied any copyright violations and argued that the lawsuits were attempts to stifle smaller competitors.
The labels’ claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still in their early stages. Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI’s use of copyrighted material to create something new.
But in the music cases, the interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements can make it harder to determine when parts of a copyrighted song have been infringed compared with works like written text, said Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright analysis.
The question of what constitutes fair use in these situations could make or break the cases, legal experts said, but no court has yet ruled on the issue in the AI context.
Read more about why the music cases pose a particularly thorny question for the courts.
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- A U.S. judge formally ended Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy – a move that lets sexual harassment, defamation and other lawsuits proceed against him stemming from his past work for former President Donald Trump – following a two-week delay precipitated by his failure to pay certain legal fees.
- Google lost its bid to depose the Texas attorney general’s office in its lawsuit accusing the Alphabet unit of unlawfully collecting biometric privacy data of millions of Texans without consent. Judge Leah Robinson in Midland County ruled for Texas, which opposed Google’s effort to depose the state, calling it an impermissible effort to “investigate the investigator.” Google has denied any wrongdoing.
- An auditor at an unidentified accounting firm who is facing discipline by the federal Public Company Accounting Oversight Board cannot pursue a lawsuit while remaining anonymous, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in D.C. ruled. Boasberg said the John Doe plaintiff failed to convince him that his privacy interest outweighed the public’s substantial interest in knowing his name.
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That’s how much billing rates for attorneys increased in the second quarter of this year, as compared with the same time period last year, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s Law Firm Financial Index, which tracks key financial metrics across 195 large and midsize law firms. That, combined with an 2.4% increase in overall law firm demand and relatively modest 5.3% growth in direct expenses, puts U.S. law firms collectively in one of their strongest financial positions of the past decade, the report said. Equity partner profits were up, too.
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“But that’s not how stare decisis works.“
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—D.C. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, who wrote the majority opinion rejecting a challenge to an Obama-era rule allowing the spouses of H-1B visa holders to work in the U.S., saying a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling curtailing the powers of federal agencies had no impact on the case. Save Jobs USA had argued that a 2022 D.C. Circuit ruling in a similar case was wrong and didn’t apply after the high court’s ruling on the Chevron doctrine, but the appellate court said that while its 2022 decision cited Chevron, the court had found that federal law clearly authorized the challenged rule. That was also true of the rule at issue in Save Jobs’ lawsuit, the court said.
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- Today, U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock in Mississippi will preside over a non-jury trial in a lawsuit challenging the voting district lines used to elect members of the Mississippi Supreme Court, which they say dilute the voting power of Black people. The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center and Simpson Thacher.
- On Tuesday, Texas-based U.S. District Judge David Ezra will hold a hearing in the Biden administration’s bid to force Texas to remove a 1,000-foot long floating barrier placed in the Rio Grande river to deter illegal border crossings, part of a series of legal conflicts between the Republican-led state and the federal government over immigration policies.
- Also on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett will begin a week-long hearing over whether to block Disney’s sports streaming deal with Fox and Warner Bros. Sports-focused streaming service FuboTV in February sued to stop the joint venture, saying it violated U.S. antitrust law. Disney and the other defendants have denied the deal will harm consumers.
- On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson in Oregon will hold a status conference in the FTC’s lawsuit challenging Kroger’s planned $25 billion purchase of rival grocer Albertsons. Nelson is set to consider later this month whether to preliminarily enjoin the deal. The companies have asserted their tie-up plan would benefit consumers.
- On Thursday in San Francisco, Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg will consider Oracle’s agreement to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people’s privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties. Oracle denied any wrongdoing.
- On Friday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, will hold a status conference with the lawyers involved in product liability cases accusing Meta and other social media companies of creating addictive products for young people. Meta and other defendants have denied wrongdoing, and various motions attacking the claims are pending before the court. Plaintiffs firms Lieff Cabraser and Motley Rice are co-lead counsel. Covington represents Meta.
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Court calendars are subject to last-minute docket changes.
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- The DOJ filed a lawsuit against TikTok and parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children’s privacy on the social media app as the Biden administration continues its crackdown on the site. The government said TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act that requires services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13.
- SVB Financial Group, the former owner of failed Silicon Valley Bank, received a judge’s permission to turn over its assets to creditors and end its bankruptcy. Its bankruptcy restructuring has made provisions for the creation of a trust to pursue litigation against the FDIC, which seized $1.9 billion from SVB Financial’s bank accounts during Silicon Valley Bank’s 2023 collapse – one of the largest in U.S. banking history.
- A group of 21 states and more than 50 U.S. lawmakers filed briefs backing the DOJ in its defense of a law that requires China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. assets by Jan. 19 or face a ban. “TikTok is a threat to national security and consumer privacy,” the states wrote.
- A former Bayer unit convinced a California federal jury that it did not block a pet care startup from competing in the retail market for a type of topical animal tick and flea treatment. After a two-week trial, the jury determined in its second day of deliberations in San Jose that plaintiff Tevra Brands had not shown that there was a “relevant” market for the treatments under U.S. antitrust law.
- Film producer David Wulf and his attorneys at Pacific Legal Foundation have asked the 10th Circuit to rule that the NLRB’s in-house proceedings violate the U.S. Constitution and that the agency lacks the power to order employers to pay money damages to workers who are illegally fired.
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Plaintiffs’ in securities litigation often focus their cases on allegations that key performance metrics are misleading. Companies can help minimize the risk of litigation centered on this subject of recurring interest to the plaintiffs’ bar, write Virginia Milstead and Mark Foster of Skadden. Here are some takeaways to consider.
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