Law

As legal wrangling over generative AI and copyright continues, ElevenLabs has launched its latest AI audio product with Eleven Music. There are many AI music generators out there, but the company claims this one “is cleared for nearly all commercial uses, from film and television to podcasts and social media videos, and from advertisements to gaming.”

In the Washington Post, Joseph Menn reports on a 25th anniversary reunion for some of the people behind Napster, as they reflected on how it all played out, and the impact it’s had on tech companies dealing with the threat of regulation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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”:

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.”