Adi Robertson

But forget the thinkpieces about weapons of mass destruction — it’s that Kai Bird, coauthor of J. Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus, is part of a fresh group of authors joining one of the numerous copyright lawsuits against generative AI companies.

It’s from New York, and it would require large social media companies to let third-party services do things including blocking or muting content on behalf of users — basically mandating a certain level of free, open API access. Mike Masnick has some thoughtful analysis:

Hot off a recent Utah Supreme Court decision, legal blogger Orin Kerr lays out the legal conundrum around whether you can be legally compelled to provide a passcode or password (and how that’s actually slightly different from, but closely related to, having to unlock your phone):

Bloomberg says an antitrust order on the anti-steering provisions — which stop music services from pushing subscriptions outside the App Store — is coming next year:

The Free Law Project has updated its bot system with support for Bluesky, so our Verge-curated Tech Cases Bot now has a home there in addition to X/Twitter and Mastodon. Follow it for easy updates to cases like Epic v. Google whenever new documents are filed!

As 404 Media notes, an investigation into alleged “hacker-for-hire shop” Appin has been removed — Reuters says temporarily — after what Reuters calls a preliminary court order that the news outlet is fighting. There’s no clear evidence of factual errors here, which might make this a case of de facto press censorship in India. You can still read the feature here.

Sure, it’s not as eye-catching as Musk telling Disney to go fuck itself. But Musk and The New York Times’ Sorkin had a painfully ill-informed conversation about intellectual property and AI, starting with the factually wrong statement that AI companies claim they’re not training on copyrighted works. It’s been driving me up a wall, so kudos to Mike Masnick for laying out how silly it all was.

The error stemmed from a Reuters report that erroneously estimated the Trump-backed social media company as having a net loss of $73 million rather than $31.5 million, apparently misinterpreting a nebulous profit declaration. (The Verge initially reported the wrong numbers in a link to Reuters’ reporting, too. We’re not a party to this suit.)