Zuckerberg ‘Personally Authorized and Encouraged’ Meta’s Copyright Infringement
Five major publishers and author Scott Turow have sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that Zuckerberg “personally authorized and actively encouraged” massive copyright infringement by using pirated books, journal articles, and web-scraped material to train Meta’s Llama AI systems. Meta denies wrongdoing and says it w … ⌘ Read more

AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
A satirical but working tool called Malus uses AI to create “clean room” clones of open-source software, aiming to reproduce the same functionality while shedding attribution and copyleft obligations. “It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court Wipes Piracy Liability Verdict Against Grande Communications
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Following on the heels of the landmark Cox v. Sony ruling, the Supreme Court has vacated the contributory copyright infringement verdict against ISP Grande Communications, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its decision in light of the new precedent. […] The order … ⌘ Read more

AI Can Clone Open-Source Software In Minutes
ZipNada writes: Two software researchers recently demonstrated how modern AI tools can reproduce entire open-source projects, creating proprietary versions that appear both functional and legally distinct. The partly-satirical demonstration shows how quickly artificial intelligence can blur long-standing boundaries between coding innovation, copyright law, and the open-source principles … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Issues Copyright Takedown Requests To Remove 8,000+ Copies of Claude Code Source Code
Anthropic is using copyright takedown notices to try to contain an accidental leak of the underlying instructions for its Claude Code AI agent. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8, … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court Sides With Internet Provider In Copyright Fight Over Pirated Music
Longtime Slashdot reader JackSpratts writes: The Supreme Court unanimously said on Wednesday that a major internet provider could not be held liable for the piracy of thousands of songs online in a closely watched copyright clash. Music labels and publishers sued Cox Communications in 2018, saying the company had fa … ⌘ Read more

Encyclopedia Britannica Sues OpenAI For Copyright, Trademark Infringement
Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI, alleging its AI models were trained on nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles and sometimes reproduce or misattribute passages to the encyclopedia. The lawsuit also claims trademark infringement and argues tools like ChatGPT divert traffic away from Britannica and Merriam-Webster sites. Engadge … ⌘ Read more

FSF Threatens Anthropic Over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freely
In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs.
But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic’s training data apparently even included the book “Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software” — for which the Fre … ⌘ Read more

Judges Find AI Doesn’t Have Human Intelligence in Two New Court Cases
Within the last month two U.S> judges have effectively declared AI bots are not human, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik:

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his … ⌘ Read more

AI-Generated Art Can’t Be Copyrighted After Supreme Court Declines To Review the Rule
The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review a case challenging the U.S. Copyright Office’s stance that AI-generated works lack the required human authorship for copyright protection, leaving lower court rulings intact. The Verge reports: The Monday decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a comput … ⌘ Read more

How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains
Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called “Project Panama” to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spe … ⌘ Read more

Public Domain Day 2026 Brings Betty Boop, Nancy Drew and ‘I Got Rhythm’ Into the Commons
As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner’s As I Lay D … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Says ‘Anti-Copyright Extremists’ Scraped Its Library
A group of activists has scraped Spotify’s entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna’s Archive, a search engine for “shadow libraries” that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as “anti-copyright extremists … ⌘ Read more

Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:

-Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls. … ⌘ Read more

ACM To Make Its Entire Digital Library Open Access Starting January 2026
The Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and A … ⌘ Read more

Disney Says Google AI Infringes Copyright ‘On a Massive Scale’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infr … ⌘ Read more

Disney and OpenAI have made a surprise deal – what happens next?
In a stunning reversal, Disney has changed tack with regard to safeguarding its copyrighted characters from incorporation into AI tools – perhaps a sign that no one can stem the tide of AI ⌘ Read more

India Proposes Charging OpenAI, Google For Training AI On Copyrighted Content
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organ … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Changes How Copyright Protection is Applied To Kindle Direct’s Self-Published Ebooks
Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats. Fro … ⌘ Read more

The New York Times Is Suing Perplexity For Copyright Infringement
The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement, accusing the AI startup of repackaging its paywalled reporting without permission. TechCrunch reports: The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week. The Times’ suit claims that “Perplexity provides commerci … ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Nice to see someone else also participating! 🥳

(Btw, they don’t want us to share our inputs: https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/inputs/ Yeah, it’s a bit annoying. I also have to do quite a bit of filtering on my repo …)

OpenAI Loses Fight To Keep ChatGPT Logs Secret In Copyright Case
A federal judge has ordered OpenAI to hand over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs in its copyright battle with the New York Times and other outlets. Reuters reports: U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in a decision made public on Wednesday said that the 20 million logs were relevant to the outlets’ claims and that handing them over would not risk vio … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court Hears Copyright Battle Over Online Music Piracy
The Supreme Court appears inclined to side with Cox Communications in a major copyright case, suggesting that ISPs shouldn’t be held liable for users’ music piracy based solely on “mere knowledge,” given the risk of forcing outages for universities, hospitals, and other large customers. The New York Times reports: Leading music labels and publishers who … ⌘ Read more

Copyright Winter Is Coming (To Wikipedia?)
Comments ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Fights Order To Turn Over Millions of ChatGPT Conversations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users’ private conversations. The artificial … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Used Song Lyrics In Violation of Copyright Laws, German Court Says
A Munich court ruled that OpenAI violated German copyright law by training its models on lyrics from nine songs and allowing ChatGPT to reproduce them. OpenAI now faces damages as it considers an appeal. Reuters reports: The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

And, one last missed:

• AI is Forcing Legal Modernization: The copyright double standard is a failure of outdated law. AI provides the necessary impetus for legal reform to either create fair compensation frameworks for creators or establish a clear new definition of fair use for data-driven models.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

What Happened to Piracy? Copyright Enforcement Fades as AI Giants Rise
Comments ⌘ Read more

How GitHub protects developers from copyright enforcement overreach
Why the U.S. Supreme Court case Cox v. Sony matters for developers and sharing updates to our Transparency Center and Acceptable Use Policies.

The post How GitHub protects developers from copyright enforcement overreach appeared first on [The Gi … ⌘ Read more

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

On my blog: Copyright Thoughts https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/18/copyright-thoughts.html #copyright #freeculture #rant

Adobe Caves When Challenged by Lunduke
After filing multiple fraudulent YouTube copyright claims, in order to silence a critical journalist, Adobe failed to follow through with legal action when challenged. ⌘ Read more

Counter Claim Filed Against Adobe’s Efforts to Silence Journalist
Adobe filed a fraudulent Copyright Claim (via YouTube) in order to silence critical reporting from The Lunduke Journal. ⌘ Read more

Adobe Makes 2nd Fraudulent Copyright Claim Against Lunduke Journal
Adobe’s war on Tech Journalism continues, as they issue a second false copyright claim in 48 hours. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah and I don’t get why … There’s no copyrighted music in it, no ads (at least I don’t see any) … Just weird. 🥴

Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data
Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971446

Points: 518

# Comments: 303 ⌘ Read more

3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down as copyright violation
Article URL: https://twitter.com/3blue1brown/status/1876291319955398799

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612494

Points: 504

# Comments: 243 ⌘ Read more

10 Exciting Things Entering the Public Domain in 2025
When a work enters the public domain, it’s like releasing an immortal animal into the wild after it has been caged for a hundred years. Now freed from copyright restrictions, the work can be studied, reinterpreted, and explored in ways that better reveal its true nature. Scholars, creators, and fans are granted new freedoms to […]

The post [10 Exciting Things Entering the Public Domain in 2025](https://listverse.com/2025/01/03 … ⌘ Read more

“Plez give me all the compute, money, and copyright allowance and i give you shitty autocomplete for fee!” - Tech Bro.

Internet Archive Takes Another Step Towards Death
Archive.org loses appeal in book copyright case with the Sony / Universal Music lawsuit still looming on the horizon. ⌘ Read more

Sam Whited: Thoughts on a New Software Commons
I use various legal and economic terms of art in this post, but I am neither a
lawyer or an economist.
They should be read in the way a layperson might read them, not as a serious
legal or economic analysis or advice.

I’ve long held that software being open source1 is necessary, but not
sufficient.
Using copyright and contract law to enshrine the freedom to use your software
instead … ⌘ Read more

Download Over 900 eBooks of Classics Free from StandardEbooks
If you’re interested in doing some reading of the classics, you may appreciate the Standard Ebooks project, which offers free high quality ebooks that are well-formatted, proofread, and professionally designed using style manuals. Standard Ebooks focuses on books that are in the public domain and without copyright restrictions, which is how they’re able to offer … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2023/12/21/dow … ⌘ Read more

Download Over 900 eBooks of Classics Free from StandardEbooks
If you’re interested in doing some reading of the classics, you may appreciate the Standard Ebooks project, which offers free high quality ebooks that are well-formatted, proofread, and professionally designed using style manuals. Standard Ebooks focuses on books that are in the public domain and without copyright restrictions, which is how they’re able to offer … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2023/12/21/dow … ⌘ Read more

Copyright, Piracy, and the bleak future of The Internet Archive
Lunduke’s Big Tech Show - Dec 19, 2023 ⌘ Read more

RT by @mind_booster: Gostava de ouvir por exemplo um debate sobre as opções do Governo em termos tecnológicos, e que se percebesse o fundamento político de contratar já soluções com o ChatGPT enquanto o CEO ameaça sair da Europa por não estar disposto a revelar se os dados do modelo são copyrighted.
Gostava de ouvir por exemplo um debate sobre as opções do Governo em termos tecnológicos, e que se percebesse o fundamento político de contratar já soluções com o ChatGPT enquanto o CEO ameaça sair da Europa por não … ⌘ Read more

There’s a link to the blog post, but they extracted a summary in hopes of keeping people in Google properties (something they’ve been called out on many times).

I was never contacted to ask if I was OK with Google extracting a summary of my blog post and sticking it on the web site. There is a very clear copyright designation at the bottom of each page, including that one. So, by putting their own brand over my text, they violated my copyright. Straightforward theft right there.

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of “If you’re not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you’re going to be left behind.”

Two things about that:

1. No you’re not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you’re already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
   
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they’ve been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the “AI” that they’re forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don’t fall for it. It’s far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way–most of these “AI” tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that’ll catch up with them.
   

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.

**RT by @mind_booster: Na 🇫🇮, o Parlamento rejeitou a proposta de transposição da diretiva do dto de autor, por não assegurar o balanço necessário com os dtos humanos, nomeadamente o dto à educação e ciência.

Em 🇵🇹, este tipo de preocupações nem sequer foram consideradas.
¼
https://libereurope.eu/article/the-fundamental-right-to-education-and-science-constitutional-law-v-copyright-law/**
Na 🇫🇮, o Parlamento rejeitou a proposta de transposição da diretiva do dto de autor, por não assegurar o balanço necessário … ⌘ Read more