These days, some of tech’s most important decisions are being made inside courtrooms. Google and Facebook are fending off antitrust accusations, while patent suits determine how much control of their own products they can have. The slow fight over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act threatens platforms like Twitter and YouTube with untold liability suits for the content they host. Gig economy companies like Uber and Airbnb are fighting for their very existence as their workers push for the protections of full-time employees. In each case, judges and juries are setting the rules about exactly how far tech companies can push the envelope and exactly how much protection everyday people have. This is where we keep track of those legal fights and the broader principles behind them. When you move fast and break things, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise when you end up in court.
Robin AI CEO Richard Robinson on hallucinations, facts versus truth, and how lawyers can use generative AI today.
I appeared on On the Media to discuss our story about the Anime Nazi who allegedly hacks universities. I explain why the identity of the alleged hacker is important, why the Times’ obfuscation of its sources is troubling, and what’s at stake in the Republican war on higher education: upward mobility.
Getting copied is devastating — but not necessarily illegal. Who owns what in an era of unprecedented mass consumption?
My longstanding personal obsession, Rupert Murdoch, is getting sued by Donald Trump for the story The Wall Street Journal ran yesterday about a letter to noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
I imagine this will get either thrown out entirely or settled — Murdoch often settles — but truth is an absolute defense in a defamation case. The WSJ isn’t Fox News. It’s Murdoch’s crown jewel — one he refused to tamper with, even when it cost him a $125 million investment. A settlement could permanently damage the paper’s reputation. Who ya got?
After The Wall Street Journal’s scoop last night on Epstein’s relationship with Donald Trump, I was inspired to go look at some old stories about the sex criminal’s buddies.
On reread, one thing stuck out to me: how close Epstein was to the pioneers, commercializers, and money men of AI. The WSJ scoop suggests there are still new stories out there; I wonder what’s lurking in the field of artificial intelligence — surely I am not the only person who’d like to learn more.
Some patriotic reflections on this Independence Day.
Turns out copyright law in music is special — and the record labels are bringing out the big guns.
Meta and Anthropic defended AI training as fair use, but with major caveats.
The Danish government is proposing a copyright law amendment to give citizens ownership rights to their body, facial features, and voice, theoretically allowing them to demand companies to remove any AI-generated content that uses their likeness and fight for compensation.
“Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes, and I’m not willing to accept that,” said Danish culture minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt.
Several writers have launched a lawsuit against Microsoft over claims it used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model to respond to user prompts. Judges have shot down similar cases that authors raised against Meta and Anthropic this week — perhaps the third time’s the charm?
The US District Court in Washington, DC, was the home of two of the most important tech trials in decades — plus so much more.
The incredibly weird saga of the ordered, then reversed, then passed, then upheld, then ignored, then ignored even harder attempt to ban one of America’s most popular social networks continues — as it will continue until US-China tensions cool down, everyone forgets it ever happened, or the heat death of the universe.
The dispute between Apple and Optis Wireless Technology is headed for its third trial after an appeals court threw out a 2021 jury verdict due to faulty jury instructions, Reuters reports. The case is based on Optis’ accusation that Apple infringed on its patents for LTE standard-essential technology. The damages award has already been retried once after a judge said the jury that awarded $506 million to Optis hadn’t considered the reasonableness of the amount.
Astute AI copyright observer Michael Weinberg raises some good questions about the Common Pile, an AI training dataset billed as being composed of only “openly licensed text”:
On one hand, this is an interesting effort to build a new type of training dataset that illustrates how even the “easy” parts of this process are actually hard. On the other hand, I worry that some people read “openly licensed training dataset” as the equivalent of (or very close to) “LLM free of copyright issues.”
[michaelweinberg.org]
The head of the AI video platform on Hollywood, copyright, and the future of filmmaking.
Isn’t it funny how all these tech and science men have ties to Epstein? I wonder why! Anyway, Epstein invested with Thiel’s Valar Ventures — and that investment hasn’t previously been disclosed. Guess what that means? “There’s a good chance much of the windfall will not go to any of the roughly 200 victims whom the disgraced financier abused when they were teenagers or young women.”
37-year-old John Woeltz was arrested Friday after a man escaped a Manhattan townhome and told authorities that Woeltz and another man had kidnapped him and were “beating, shocking and torturing him for weeks” after he refused to give them his Bitcoin password, reports The New York Times.
The news echoes a recent Wall Street Journal report about a wave of violent attacks on cryptocurrency investors in the US and worldwide.
Shira Perlmutter, who may or may not be the head of the Copyright Office depending on how deranged the Supreme Court’s interpretation of executive power becomes, has now sued the Trump administration, including Perlmutter’s supposed replacement Paul Perkins “in his capacity as the person claiming to be the Register of Copyrights.”
[courtlistener.com]
