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Category Archives: Intellectual Property

Inside Redbox’s insane bankruptcy unwinding

Sherwood: “Ever wanted to own 46 copies of Orlando Bloom’s latest movie? What about a dozen empty Redbox DVD cases? Or maybe an entire Redbox kiosk, free with local pickup? It’s all up for grabs, thanks to Redbox’s recent demise. The chain of DVD-rental kiosks filed for bankruptcy in June after racking up close to a billion dollars in debt. The bankruptcy case was quickly converted to Chapter 7, legal speak for the end of the road for a corporation that has no options left to restructure or recover. “There is no means to continue to pay employees, pay any bills, or otherwise finance this case,” bankruptcy Judge Thomas Horan said, calling Redbox and its corporate parent “hopelessly insolvent.” In a typical Chapter 7 bankruptcy case, a company’s assets get sold off to the highest bidders, and the resulting money gets divided among creditors. But after a dizzying company collapse with legal disputes swirling, Redbox’s afterlife is anything but ordinary. Grocery chains are hauling its once ubiquitous red kiosks to the dump, workers who never got their last paychecks are hawking DVDs on eBay, and customers are trading tips online on how to trick any remaining rental machines into spitting out movies without having to pay for them. It’s a free-for-all, albeit with some significant risks: not only could customers get dinged for any unpaid late charges, but improperly disposed of kiosks could put the personal data of countless consumers at risk…”

Law and Technological Innovations: Three Reasons to Pause

Smith, Michael L., (September 04, 2024). 12 Belmont Law Review (Forthcoming 2025), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4946479 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4946479 – “Faced with optimistic accounts of technological innovations, businesses, law firms, and governments face pressure to rush into adopting these technologies and enjoying the increased efficiency, reduced costs, and other benefits that are promised. This essay sets… Continue Reading

LLMs don’t do formal reasoning and that is a HUGE problem

Marcus on AI: “A superb new article on LLMs from six AI researchers at Apple who were brave enough to challenge the dominant paradigm has just come out. Everyone actively working with AI should read it, or at least this terrific X thread by senior author, Mehrdad Farajtabar, that summarizes what they observed. One key… Continue Reading

FTC Sends Refunds to Consumers Who Bought Pyrex Glass Manufacturer’s Products Falsely Advertised as Made in USA

FTC: The Federal Trade Commission is sending more than $88,000 in refunds to consumers who bought Chinese-made measuring cups marketed as “Made in USA” by Instant Brands, the maker of Pyrex-brand kitchen and home products. The FTC took action against Instant Brands in 2023 charging that the company claimed that all its popular glass measuring… Continue Reading

Unlocking AI for All: The Case for Public Data Banks

LawFare: “The data relied on by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other artificial intelligence (AI) developers is not readily available to other AI labs. Google and Meta relied, in part, on data gathered from their own products to train and fine-tune their models. OpenAI used tactics to acquire data that now would not work or may… Continue Reading

Inside Iron Mountain: It’s Time to Talk About Hard Drives

MIX: “A few years ago, archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer… Continue Reading

Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation

Press release: “On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars who provided manuscripts or peer review, alleging… Continue Reading

When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself

The New York Times – As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results. ” The internet is becoming awash in words and images generated by artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, wrote in February that the company generated about 100 billion words… Continue Reading

New web crawler launched by Meta last month is quietly scraping the internet for AI training data

Fortune [no paywall]: “Meta has quietly unleashed a new web crawler to scour the internet and collect data en masse to feed its AI model. The crawler, named the Meta External Agent, was launched last month according to three firms that track web scrapers and bots across the web. The automated bot essentially copies, or… Continue Reading

EU Proposal for an ePrivacy Regulation

“The European Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on ePrivacy aims at reinforcing trust and security in the digital world. Why a reform of ePrivacy legislation? European legislation needs to keep up with the fast pace at which IT-based services are developing and evolving. The Commission has started a major modernisation process of the data protection… Continue Reading

Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly

Nature – Artificial-intelligence developers are buying access to valuable data sets that contain research papers — raising uncomfortable questions about copyright. “Academic publishers are selling access to research papers to technology firms to train artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Some researchers have reacted with dismay at such deals happening without the consultation of authors. The trend is… Continue Reading