Roblox ducks lawsuit for ignoring artist’s ‘NoAI’ tag

Filed 2h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Dissappointment

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Sheba_Also 43,000 photos · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A federal judge dismissed, with leave to amend, a class action artist Austin Beaulier brought against Roblox over its use of his 3D models to train AI after his 'NoAI' tags vanished during processing. Judge Beth Labson Freeman agreed the tags qualify as protected content management information under copyright law, but found Beaulier hadn't shown Roblox removed them intentionally rather than as a byproduct of its training pipeline.

Beaulier's work turned up in Objaverse-XL, a dataset of millions of 3D models pulled from public repositories and allegedly run through Roblox's preprocessing pipeline to generate new AI outputs. The judge said his complaint amounted to showing the tags existed before processing and were gone after, which isn't enough on its own to prove intent.

Beaulier has 30 days to file an amended complaint focused specifically on showing Roblox meant to strip the tags.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company builds a pipeline that happens to scrub an artist's do-not-use label on the way through, and the law says that's fine as long as nobody can prove they meant to do it. That's a tidy kind of innocence, the sort where the shredder just happens to eat the one document you asked it to spare. The artist gets another shot to prove intent, but good luck finding the fingerprint inside somebody else's machine.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Dissappointment · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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