Hello and welcome to TechScape. If you need me after this newsletter has been published, you'll be busy staring at the wedding photos of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, the most star-studded relationship in Guardy to destroy technology news this year. I found it to be a sticky and epic event. Everyone was there except Charlize Theron said Monday. “Maybe he was the only person not invited to Bezos' wedding.
AI companies begin to win the copyright battle
Last week, the tech company won several victories over the use of copyrighted texts to create artificial intelligence products.
Humanity: A US judge determined that he was the maker of humanity's artificial chatbots, using the book to train artificial intelligence systems without author permission, to have not violated copyright laws. Judge William Allsup compared the use of human books to “readers who aim to become writers.”
And the next day, Meta: US District Judge Vince ChhabriaIn San Francisco, in a decision on the meta incident, the author said he did not present sufficient evidence that technology companies' AI will cause “market dilution” by flooding the market with similar work.
On the same day Meta received a favorable award, the author group sued Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement in the creation of the company's Megatron text generator. Judging by the rulings that support meta and humanity, the author faces a difficult battle.
These three cases are skirmishes in a broader legal war over copyrighted media, which is infuriating. Three weeks ago, Disney and NBC Universal sued the Mid Journey, claiming that the AI image generator by the company's name and upcoming video generators illegally used iconic studio characters such as Darth Vader and the Simpson Family. The world's largest record labels, Sony, Universal and Warner, sued two companies that manufacture AI-powered music generators Suno and Udio. In terms of text, the New York Times suits for Openai and Microsoft are ongoing.
The lawsuit was first filed over text generated by AI. As their rulings emerge, the next question in the copyright battle is whether decisions about one type of media will apply to the next media.
“We are pleased to announce that John Strand, a trademark and copyright lawyer for the law firm Wolf Greenfield,” said: “The impact of copyrighted works on the market is becoming an important component of fair use analysis, and the book market is different from the film market.”
For Strand, the case on the image appears to be more favorable to copyright holders, as it is said that the AI model produces the same image as the copyright image of the training data.
Even the artificial verdict revealed strange and terrible facts. The company has saved 7m books as pirated to create an AI training database. To fix the fraud, the company purchased physical copies and scanned them, and digitized the text. The owners of seven million physical books that currently do not retain their usefulness, humanity has destroyed them. The company bought books, diced, scanned texts, and threw them away, reports Ars Technica. There aren't many disruptive ways to digitize books, but they are slow. The AI industry is here to move fast and break things.
Laying waste in millions of books presents the crude literal of the fierce consumption of content that AI companies need to create products.
AI and the Environment: Bad News
Last week's story update: Trump's phone
Two stories I wrote last week saw an important update on the following days.
The website for Trump's gold mobile phone, “T1,” has removed its “made in America” pledge in favor of “proudly Americans” and “bringing life in America.”
Trump appears to have followed Apple's example. This sounds the issue of Origin, but emphasizes the American nature of the iPhone by sculpting them in “design in California.” What is not said: assembled in China or India and sourced from many other countries. Trump and his family seem to have chosen a similar evasive catchphrase, but their original promises are thrown far more into Starker's relief.
The third descriptor currently appearing on Trump's phone site “American Proud Design” appears to be the most obvious king by Apple.
The catchphrase for “Made in the USA” has legitimate weight. Companies face litigation only on the number of products produced in the US, and major US trade regulators have established criteria for determining the actions behind the slogan. It is extremely difficult to measure a smartphone's manufacturing history to these benchmarks, due to the majority of expert estimates.
Trump intends to repatriate manufacturing in the US with his drastic tariffs, but it appears he has learned what other telephone companies already know. Making phones only in the US is complicated and restrictive, and doing so enforces serious constraints on the final product.
Read last week's Gold Trump Phone newsletter.
…and online age check
Last week I wrote about Smatty, a porn hub, returning to France. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the age checks passed in Texas. Pornhub has blocked access to anyone in Texas for the majority of two years, protesting, like they did in France for three weeks. Clarence Thomas summarised the court's reasoning:
“HB 1181 simply requires adults to verify their age before accessing child obscene speech,” Clarence Stomus wrote in a court's 6-3 majority opinion. “This law advances the state's important interest in protecting children from sexually explicit content, and is properly adjusted to allow users to verify their age through established ways of providing government-issued identification and shared transaction data.”
Elena Kagan challenged alongside two other liberal justice in the court.
The ruling affirms not only Texas laws, but also laws from almost 20 states that have conducted online age checks. Tides around the world seem to be retreating from moving towards more reductions, allowing more free access to porn as part of a person's right to express themselves
Experts believe that the adaptable definition of indecency — Texas law requires age checks on sites whose content is the third sexual material — is weaponized against online information about sexual health, abortion, or LGBTQ identity.
“It's a disappointing day for open internet advocates,” said GS Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School. “The courts do not characterise that decision in this case, but in this case it has brought about a fundamental change in the jurisprudence of free speech, and may also create restrictions on adult access by supporting restrictions on access to minor indecency.
We'll take a close look at what happens in July when PornHub is willing to implement age checks in compliance with Online Services Act.
Read more: UK survey shows that 8% of children aged 8 to 14 years old saw online porn
Read more Read AI News
This week's AI: New WhatsApp Summary and Nobel Winner's Genome Model
The new feature is a dozen dimes, but even a little tweaking to the world's most popular messaging app could make a big difference. WhatsApp will begin to display the AI generated summary of unread messages according to the Verge.
Apple tried out the message summary. They didn't go well. The company pulled them. For companies well known for their calculated controlled releases, withdrawing the summary was humiliating. However, the difference between Apple and Meta is that Meta has been releasing AI products consistently for several years now.
In other AI news, I rarely get fascinated by new technology, but the recent release by Google's Deepmind AI Laboratory seems promising for healthcare. In accordance with a press release, Google Deepmind has released Alphagenome, an AI aimed at comprehensively and accurately predicting how a single mutant or mutation in a human DNA sequence affects a wide range of biological processes that regulate genes. The creator of Alphagenome was previously awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in Alphafold, a software that predicts the structure of proteins.
Another major question that surpasses CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning innovation, is the changes in people when genetic sequences are revised. The alphagenome appears to be poised to help solve the mystery.
