South Carolina court approves NAACP program, ABA wants court-appointed 'master' moniker to go, OpenAI’s partial copyright win, and more ?
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? South Carolina court says NAACP program doesn't violate legal practice curbs
The South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled that the state's NAACP branch can train volunteers who are not lawyers to give limited legal advice to tenants facing eviction.
The court last week?approved the program?on a provisional basis for three years, finding that properly vetted volunteers would not be engaging in the unauthorized practice of law.
The NAACP program would assist low-income South Carolinians facing eviction by training and certifying "advocates" to provide free and limited legal advice that has been vetted by housing lawyers.
"Our state has too few lawyers, and too many tenants who are being evicted," Brenda Murphy, president of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, said in a statement.?
The South Carolina NAACP had?sued the state's attorney general?in a related federal lawsuit in March 2023, seeking to bar the state from enforcing unauthorized practice of law rules against its planned efforts. Applying the practice restrictions to its initiative would violate rights protected by the First Amendment, the group said.
The NAACP dismissed its federal case following the state Supreme Court's ruling.
?? Court-appointed 'master' moniker needs to go, ABA tells US judiciary
The American Bar Association has asked the federal judiciary to drop the term “court-appointed master" and switch to “court-appointed neutral,” arguing that “master” has negative connotations and doesn’t accurately describe the role of those who help guide litigation.
The word "master, refers to one (male) person who has control or authority over another; and the most obvious example of that is slavery,”?the ABA said in a letter to the judiciary’s rulemaking bodies.
The judiciary’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rules may consider the change when it meets on April 9.
Court-appointed masters — also referred to as special masters — are individuals tasked with managing aspects of a legal case, typically in complex litigation. They sometimes mediate disputes between parties and make recommendations to the court on how to proceed.
The “master” term implies the role is primarily to make decisions, rather than helping parties resolve their difference or offer expertise in areas such as science, forensics or accounting, the ABA’s letter said.
“It makes it easier for parties to appreciate that this is a multi-faceted tool,” the ABA said of the “court-appointed neutral” name.
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?? OpenAI gets partial win in authors' US copyright lawsuit
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in California has dismissed parts of a copyright lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other authors against OpenAI over its alleged use of their books to train the large language model underlying its popular chatbot ChatGPT.
Martinez-Olguin granted most?of?OpenAI's motion to dismiss many of the writers' claims for now, joining other federal judges who have so far rejected allegations that the output of generative AI systems violates the rights of copyright holders whose works were supposedly used to train them.
Courts have not yet addressed the?core question?of whether tech companies' unauthorized use of material scraped from the internet to train AI infringes copyrights on a massive scale. OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that their AI training is protected by the copyright doctrine of fair use and that the lawsuits threaten the burgeoning AI industry.
OpenAI?argued in August?that ChatGPT's output is not similar enough to the authors' books to violate their copyrights.
Martinez-Olguin agreed that the authors "fail to explain what the outputs entail or allege that any particular output is substantially similar – or similar at all – to their books."
Last week, the authors asked the court to shut down related high-profile lawsuits brought by the New York Times and other writers, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, calling them "copycat" lawsuits. Learn more.
?? Elon Musk asks Texas court to bar deposition in defamation lawsuit
Elon Musk has asked a judge to block a bid to question him in a lawsuit that claims he spread lies on his social media platform X that a California man participated in an extremist group's street brawl.
The billionaire CEO in a?filing in Texas state court?on Monday called the move to depose him a "transparent effort to harass" him and drive up his litigation costs.
The October lawsuit by 22-year-old Benjamin Brody said Musk falsely trumpeted on X that Brody took part in a violent street brawl in Oregon on behalf of a neo-Nazi group in June.
Brody claimed users on X misidentified him as a participant, and that Musk, whose account on the site has tens of millions of followers, amplified that misinformation in a post that said “Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt).” Brody asserts that the reference was about him.
The lawsuit seeks more than $1 million in damages for what Brody called Musk's “astonishingly reckless conduct,” and said he?should be allowed to question?Musk as part of the lawsuit "to explore concepts of negligence and malice.”
Musk has denied making any defamatory statement about Brody and asked the court to dismiss the case. He argued that his post was phrased generically and "did not reference Brody, directly or indirectly."
?? That's all for today, thank you for reading?The Legal File, and have a great day!
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