Copyright News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

After The Pokemon Company revealed it would "investigate" games like Palworld for copyright infringement, the survival game's fans are confident it won't amount to much. 

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Ironmace says a court has dismissed its former publisher Nexon's request for an injunction following the publisher's claim that Dark and Darker has been written with stolen code from a game the team had been developing for Nexon.

The august representatives of the Pokémon Company have descended from their hilltop PokéMansion, approached the hushed masses of PokéFans with their flaming Torchics and shocked Pichaku placards, and asked everybody to please, please, please, please, please stop yelling at them about Palworld potentially breaching Pokémon's copyright. Or at least, that's what it sounds like they're saying between the lines of a statement published a few hours ago, in which the Pokémon Company acknowledges messages sent by the concerned PokéFaithful about "another company's game released in January 2024".

Earlier this evening, The Pokémon Company issued a press release seemingly addressing the recent conversation surrounding the new Steam Early Access release Palworld and its suspiciously familiar-looking collectible creatures. 

Palworld has absolutely exploded in popularity over the weekend, amassing millions of players and generating all kinds of controversies regarding its Pal designs. Having sensed very clear and obvious inspirations in Palworld's Pals, Pokemon fans took to social media and accused developer Pocketpair of everything from laziness to outright plagiarism, scooping up dozens of examples of Pals extremely similar to existing Pokemon.

When Palworld made its inauspicious debut in a teaser a year or so back, few thought this strange, blatant Pokémon ripoff would be anything but a quickly forgotten oddity. But after its Early Access release last week, the game has broken records and sold millions — reflecting the pent-up demand for a truly modern Pokémon-type game that the franchise’s developers seem unwilling to provide.

Pocketpair's monster-collecting survival game Palworld has rekindled the eternal debate over what exactly constitutes a breach of copyright. While the game's mechanics are more reminiscent of Ark: Survival Evolved and other tree-punching, template-arranging wilderness sims, its monsters owe obvious debts to Nintendo and Game Freaks' Pokémon games.

The creator of one of Steam's most iconic games says the company's decision to issue copyright strikes against two fan projects is "hardly surprising."

RBI Deputy Governor flags AI risks in finance sector; AI reshapes sales: Professionals save over 2 hours daily, focus on human connections; Canadian health care workers embrace AI amid staffing crisis; Samsung's AI-powered fridge generates recipes- this and more in our daily roundup. Let us take a look.

Amid rising concerns and multiple legal battles of authors, publishers, and media houses over large language models (LLMs) using their copyrighted work to train AI systems, the New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publisher has alleged that the two AI firms have been using the former's copyrighted published work unauthorized to train their respective AI models. This lawsuit has now heightened the conflict between publishers and AI companies, as regulatory institutions still try to figure out the right way to control and monitor the data AI models are trained on. 

Over five years after a copyright dispute regarding PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and the mobile game Knives Out, Krafton and NetEase have reached a settlement on the matter. 

OpenAI and Microsoft have been hit with another lawsuit, this time from nonfiction authors, who claim that the tech companies have been training their AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot (formerly Bing Chat). This comes at a time when OpenAI and Microsoft both are involved in a chaotic situation over Sam Altman being fired as the CEO of OpenAI, and his next destination, which can either be being reinstated to his original position or taking over an AI research team at Microsoft.

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

The Day Before - the survival MMO extravaganza set in a zombie apocalypse - is apparently getting a final trailer tomorrow, according to its developers. 

If you're a Google Cloud or Workspace customer experimenting with the company's generative AI tools, the company this week promised to protect you against any potential copyright claims.

Following an acquisition by Rockstar Games, the team behind GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2’s biggest roleplay mods is enforcing copyright compliance more closely, posing some big questions for several servers.  

Google said on Thursday that it will defend users of generative artificial-intelligence systems in its Google Cloud and Workspace platforms if they are accused of intellectual property violations, joining Microsoft, Adobe and other companies that have made similar pledges.

Cyberpunk 2077 fans are eager for the big expansion release. The launch of the base game was incredibly rocky. There was a ton of flack tossed towards CD Projekt Red, resulting in the studio scrapping plans. Instead, their focus was ensuring that this game was updated to the point that it met their standards. So that, unfortunately, meant we wouldn’t see too much new content being added compared to what CD Projekt Red likely had planned. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing inbound. We know that the game is receiving Phantom Liberty this month, the only expansion the development team is providing for the game. 

A GTA 6 leaker just suffered the might of a Rockstar copyright claim, but the developer apparently forgot to take down one screenshot.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is set to be a much bigger game than its predecessors, with developer Insomniac Games having confirmed that the upcoming sequel’s open world New York will be roughly twice as large as the previous two entries in the series. New boroughs are being added in the form of Queens (where Aunt May’s house can also be visited) and Brooklyn, while Coney Island will also be present– though it seems one notable NYC landmark won’t be present in the game.

Microsoft Corp. says it will defend buyers of its artificial intelligence products from copyright infringement lawsuits, an effort by the software giant to ease concerns customers might have about using its AI “Copilots” to generate content based on existing work.

Microsoft has noticed that some customers are afraid to use its Copilot AI given the program’s potential to accidentally plagiarize copyrighted work. 

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

US Federal Judge rules AI-generated art is uncopyrightable; UK PM Rishi Sunak allocates 100 mn euros for AI chips in global computing race; Study reveals 40% of workers need reskilling in 3 years due to AI; IIT Madras aims to secure 25 gold medals in 10 years with AI training solutions- this and more in our daily AI roundup. Let us take a look.

The battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and people in creative fields has been ongoing for some time. In the US, actors and writers working in Hollywood have been on strike to limit the usage of AI as they may lose their jobs. Even authors have joined the cause by submitting an open letter to corporations involved in developing these AI tools requesting them to pay fair compensation for using their work as “food” for AI. And now, reports have emerged that a major news publisher New York Times may take legal action against OpenAI, the developer of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

A popular mod for GTA 5 has been removed from Nexus Mods due to a DMCA takedown from Take-Two Interactive, according to its creator.

Last week, players using Cheat Engine in Tekken 8's network test leaked part of Tekken 8's roster. And this week, Bandai Namco is banning people from making videos about it.

The Last of Us clone has been removed from the Nintendo eShop after Sony issued a copyright claim. 

Any gaming company looking to copy a competitor's hit might want to think twice. Nintendo's The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival has officially been removed from the Switch e-shop due to its overt similarities to Naughty Dog's hit, The Last of Us, Victoria Kennedy reported at Eurogamer. Sony (which owns Naughty Dog) issued a copyright claim against the game just over a month after its release, a move that has not only taken it off the market but also scrubbed YouTube of its trailer.

The knockoff called The Last Hope — Dead Zone Revival apparently just got knocked off the eShop in the UK.

The developer behind The Last Hope made no attempt to conceal the game it took, uh, inspiration from when it was released on Nintendo Switch. Because that's the point, it seems. It's almost definitely there to dupe someone who thought they were getting the non-existent Switch port of The Last of Us. One of the characters even looks exactly like Ellie and everything.

The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival — the The Last of Us rip-off that turned up on the Nintendo eShop last month — has been removed from sale.