The internet's "enshittification," as veteran journalist and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow describes it, began decades before TikTok made the scene. Elder millennials remember the good old days of Napster — followed by the much worse old days of Napster being sued into oblivion along with Grokster and the rest of the P2P sharing ecosystem, until we were left with a handful of label-approved, catalog-sterilized streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify. Three cheers for corporate copyright litigation. In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, Doctorow examines the modern social media landscape, cataloging and illustrating the myriad failings and short-sighted business decisions of the Big Tech companies operating the services that promised us the future but just gave us more Nazis. We have both an obligation and responsibility to dismantle these systems, Doctorow argues, and a means to do so with greater interoperability. In this week's Hitting the Books excerpt, Doctorow examines the aftermath of the lawsuits against P2P sharing services, as well as the role that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "notice-and-takedown" reporting system and YouTube's "ContentID" scheme play on modern streaming sites. Verso Publishing Excerpted from by The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow. Published by Verso. Copyright © 2023 by Cory Doctorow. All rights reserved. Seize the Means of... Continue reading at 'Engadget'
[ Engadget | 2023-11-05 15:30:18 UTC ]
There is nothing wrong with mining content for data, but it has to be properly regulated and creators must be compensatedJustine Roberts is the CEO of MumsnetAfter nearly 25 years as a founder of Mumsnet, I considered myself pretty unshockable when it came to the workings of big tech. But my jaw... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2024-09-28 07:00:09 UTC ]
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An appeals court has upheld an earlier finding that the online Internet Archive violated copyright law by scanning and sharing digital books without the publishers’ permission Continue reading at ABC News
[ ABC News | 2024-09-04 21:58:00 UTC ]
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When most tech companies are challenged with a lawsuit, the expected defense is to deny wrongdoing. To give a reasonable explanation of why the business' actions were not breaking any laws. Music AI startups Udio and Suno have gone for a different approach: admit to doing exactly what you were... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2024-08-01 23:31:32 UTC ]
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Major music labels are taking on AI startups that they believe trained on their songs without paying. Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group sued the music generators Suno and Udio for allegedly infringing on copyrighted works on a “massive scale.” The Recording Industry... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2024-06-24 17:29:16 UTC ]
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Publisher frustration is mounting at AI search startup Perplexity, which is backed by Jeff Bezos and other tech titans, for circumventing attempts to block its crawlers from accessing and serving up media content, potentially cutting publishers out of billions in ad... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2024-06-21 17:04:46 UTC ]
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Last month, TheNew York Times claimed that tech giants OpenAI and Google have waded into a copyright gray area by transcribing the vast volume of YouTube videos and using that text as additional training data for their AI models despite terms of service that prohibit such efforts and copyright... Continue reading at O'Reilly Radar
[ O'Reilly Radar | 2024-06-18 12:58:16 UTC ]
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OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2024-04-06 09:00:17 UTC ]
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It's getting hard to keep up with copyright lawsuits against generative AI, with a new proposed class action hitting the courts last week. This time, authors are suing NVIDIA over its AI platform NeMo, a language model that allows businesses to create and train their own chatbots, Ars Technica... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2024-03-12 08:34:07 UTC ]
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Generative AI stretches our current copyright law in unforeseen and uncomfortable ways. In the US, the Copyright Office has issued guidance stating that the output of image-generating AI isn’t copyrightable, unless human creativity has gone into the prompts that generated the output. This ruling... Continue reading at O'Reilly Radar
[ O'Reilly Radar | 2023-12-12 10:54:00 UTC ]
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The universal chat app Beeper just got a lot more, well, universal. The company just unveiled the Beeper Mini app, which makes the bold claim to bring true iMessage support to Android devices. Even bolder? It seems to actually work, according to users who have tried it. This isn’t done in a... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-12-05 17:22:50 UTC ]
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To what extent copyright law applies to generative AI tools is a legal gray area -- and cause for concern among companies using these tools for commercial purposes. Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2023-11-20 05:01:00 UTC ]
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The internet's "enshittification," as veteran journalist and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow describes it, began decades before TikTok made the scene. Elder millennials remember the good old days of Napster — followed by the much worse old days of Napster being sued into... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-11-05 15:30:18 UTC ]
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Valve has failed to convince a court that it didn't infringe EU law by geo-blocking activation keys, according to a new ruling. The company argued that, based on copyright law, publishers had the right to charge different prices for games in different countries. However,... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-09-27 12:20:53 UTC ]
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Valve has failed to convince a court that it didn't infringe EU law by geo-blocking activation keys, according to a new ruling. The company argued that, based on copyright law, publishers had the right to charge different prices for games in different countries. However, the EU General Court... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-09-27 12:20:53 UTC ]
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Bill Willingham, the creator of the comic book series Fables, says you now own his work, fully and for all time. Willingham has released his work, which served as the basis for Telltale Games' The Wolf Among Us, to public domain — mostly because he can't afford to sue DC Comics. In a lengthy... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-09-16 13:00:10 UTC ]
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The publishers are claiming unspecified damages from the file-sharing Library Genesis, which they say has distributed files illegallyFour leading US publishers have sued an online “shadow library” that allows visitors to download textbooks and other copyrighted materials free.Cengage, Macmillan... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-09-15 16:55:19 UTC ]
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It was a hot summer of activity within the digital media space as publishers experimented with new technology, rode the social media rollercoaster and looked for ways to offset the hits to ad revenue. Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2023-08-31 04:01:00 UTC ]
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An ongoing lawsuit by artists against AI’s biggest players highlights how copyright law can’t keep pace with AI. Artificial Intelligence is rapidly transforming many industries and communities around the world. One of the first groups to feel its impact—and also generate some of its fiercest... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2023-08-10 06:00:00 UTC ]
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The tech company’s latest proposal about generative AI turns copyright law on its head, and could especially hurt smaller content creators, say expertsFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastPublishers should... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-08-08 23:00:40 UTC ]
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Elon Musk and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, are in more legal trouble. The Agence France-Presse (AFP) is suing X for not engaging in discussions about payment to the French publisher in exchange for its articles appearing on the platform. In 2019, France passed neighboring rights... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-08-03 10:55:01 UTC ]
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