Adi Robertson

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center is rightly legendary — it helped give us the desktop computer, the laser printer, and ethernet. But after more than 50 years, Xerox is deeding PARC to the (also highly influential) nonprofit research group SRI International. Xerox still hopes to reap some benefits through a “preferred research agreement” with SRI:

The Supreme Court has declined a petition from computer scientist Stephen Thaler to consider whether artificial intelligence systems can be awarded patents. That leaves Thaler with an appeals court and federal court’s earlier answer of “no.”

I didn’t realize the past week’s verification saga could get sillier, but here we are, watching Dril fight Elon Musk to keep a checkmark off his name. You know you’re selling a great product when you start punishing your most popular users by giving it to them for free.

Remember the total nonsense checkmarks Tumblr started selling in the early days of Twitter’s paid blue checks? Well, they’ve evolved. And you can put (almost) as many of them next to your blog name as you want.

Twitter might be a mess, but the CPSC is still a gem.

Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Cory Booker have reintroduced the Community Broadband Act, which removes prohibitions on building local broadband networks. Makena Kelly talked to them about a previous version in 2021, along with interviewing other advocates of expanding community broadband protections:

If not, you should be! It alerts you to filings from the highest-profile US legal cases when they show up in the PACER database, making them available for free when possible. It’s on Mastodon and (for now) Twitter, maintained by the excellent Free Law Project that also runs the RECAP archive.

If you follow intellectual property policy, you may have seen the somewhat surprising news that longtime IP reformist Larry Lessig has come out in favor of letting AIs be awarded patents. Patent expert Matthew Lane makes an opposing case: