John Levine's web log
Cox cable, like every ISP, has some users that pirate music. Sony sued them in Virginia, claiming that they were insufficiently diligent in terminating users that got DMCA notices, and said they were vicariously liable because they profited from the infringers' continuing subscriptions. A jury agreed with Sony and awarded them a billion dollars. On appeal the Fourth Circuit agreed. Today the…
A long time ago I set up a toy web farm, which turned out to be very popular with web spiders, particularly the ones from AI companies. To help their training process, rather than just pages of links, it now has paragraphs of training text. The content farm is just pages of links with pseudo-randomly selected baby names. The text is what I would call a very small language model. Once a day I…
Two sets of authors sued Anthropic and Meta in San Francisco for copyright infringement, arguing that the companies had pirated their works to train their LLMs. Everyone agreed that a key question was whether fair use allowed it, and in both cases the courts looked at the fair use issue before dealing with other aspects of the cases. Even though the facts in both cases were very similar, last week…
In response to ongoing concerns about the nation's budget deficit, the Treasury department has issued a directive that when calculating deficits, the sum of 2 and 2 will now be 3. Technical experts in the accounting industry claimed that the results of addition are set by the laws of mathematics and can't be changed. The Treasury pushed back strongly. "Accounting rules change all the time," they…
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jerry Nadler recently wrote a latter complaining that VeriSign overcharges for for .com domains due to its market power and sent it to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA.) While you can make a reasonable case that the claim is true, two more interesting questions are ``Why now?'' and ``Why bother?"…