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Category Archives: Copyright

Social Security News

Social Security News. A service of Hall & Rouse, P.C./© Charles T. Hall. Includes primary documents from DOGE and OPM, emails and chats from/to Social Security employees, author commentary, and articles from reliable media reporting on the fast moving actions to fire, using illegal terminations, as many staff and leadership as possible, around the country.

See also: A Blog For Claimants — Check It Out – “What we cover: Social Security delays and backlogs, Disability Insurance Benefits, SSI disability, Disabled Adult Child benefits, Disabled Widow and Widower Benefits, Work and Social Security Disability, Social Security’s telephone problems, Social Security disability hearings, Social Security attorneys, Long term disability and Social Security, VA benefits and Social Security, Workers compensation and Social Security.”

See also this Reddit post: Understanding the Importance of the SSA layoffs – “This post is mostly for our non-Federal employee allies within the group. I would like to explain the importance of the SSA layoffs of its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity. I would then like to implore you to please please please bring the noise. First, let’s talk about what this office is not: DEIA, especially in the bastardized way that it has been used in this administration. There are reports made from these offices that refer to DEIA, but that is a discussion for another day…”

OPINION: A librarian’s summary of, and response to, the Clarivate announcement

Siobhan Haimé, Birkbeck, University of London (with thanks to Tristan Smith for copyediting assistance) (See also the news item here) In a rather seismic announcement, Clarivate has announced the phase-out of perpetual access purchases for print, eBooks and digital collections by the end of 2025. Described as a supposedly transformative “subscription-based strategy”, this approach is… Continue Reading

Condé Nast, other news orgs say AI firm stole articles, spit out “hallucinations”

Ars Technica: “Condé Nast and several other media companies sued the AI startup Cohere today, alleging that it engaged in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement” by using news articles to train its large language model. “Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power… Continue Reading

Meta torrented over 81.7TB of pirated books to train AI, authors say

Ars Technica: “Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the “most damning evidence” yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books. Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But… Continue Reading

Public Domain Image Archive

From The Public Domain Review – Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week. Users may Search the Collection, Browse the Categories. Enter “Infinite View” (via colossal) “While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form… Continue Reading

US Copyright Office rules out copyright for AI-created content without human input

TechSpot: “The US Copyright Agency is publishing a series of reports about the relationship between copyright and AI. Despite the complexity of the issue, the organization has already said that AI-based works with no human intervention cannot enjoy copyright protection at all. Movies and other complex works created through AI means cannot be copyrighted, except… Continue Reading

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

404 Media – “A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be… Continue Reading

Wikipedia:Database download

Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA), and most is additionally licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License… Continue Reading

Strict Scrutiny

“A podcast about the United States Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. Hosted by three badass constitutional law professors– Leah Litman, Kate Shaw, and Melissa Murray– Strict Scrutiny provides in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities. Each week, Leah, Kate, and Melissa break down… Continue Reading

Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database

Wired – [unpaywalled] Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal – One of the most important AI copyright legal battles just took a major turn : “Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against… Continue Reading

Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive

“After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical… Continue Reading