Exclusive: German authors, performers call for tougher ChatGPT rules amid copyright concerns; Reuters, April 19, 2023

 Foo Yun Chee, Reuters;  Exclusive: German authors, performers call for tougher ChatGPT rules amid copyright concerns

"Forty-two German associations and trade unions representing more than 140,000 authors and performers on Wednesday urged the European Union to beef up draft artificial intelligence rules as they singled out the threat to their copyright from ChatGPT...

"The unauthorised usage of protected training material, its non-transparent processing, and the foreseeable substitution of the sources by the output of generative AI raise fundamental questions of accountability, liability and remuneration, which need to be addressed before irreversible harm occurs," the letter seen by Reuters said."

A.I. Regulation Is Coming Soon. Here’s What the Future May Hold; Fortune, October 24, 2019

David Meyer, Fortune; A.I. Regulation Is Coming Soon. Here’s What the Future May Hold

"Last year Angela Merkel’s government tasked a new Data Ethics Commission with producing recommendations for rules around algorithms and A.I. The group’s report landed Wednesday, packed with ideas for guiding the development of this new technology in a way that protects people from exploitation.

History tells us that German ideas around data tend to make their way onto the international stage...

So, what do those recommendations look like? In a word: tough."

A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics Offers a Troubling Look Into Our Values; The New Yorker, January 24, 2019

Caroline Lester, The New Yorker; A Study on Driverless-Car Ethics Offers a Troubling Look Into Our Values

"The U.S. government has clear guidelines for autonomous weapons—they can’t be programmed to make “kill decisions” on their own—but no formal opinion on the ethics of driverless cars. Germany is the only country that has devised such a framework; in 2017, a German government commission—headed by Udo Di Fabio, a former judge on the country’s highest constitutional court—released a report that suggested a number of guidelines for driverless vehicles. Among the report’s twenty propositions, one stands out: “In the event of unavoidable accident situations, any distinction based on personal features (age, gender, physical or mental constitution) is strictly prohibited.” When I sent Di Fabio the Moral Machine data, he was unsurprised by the respondent’s prejudices. Philosophers and lawyers, he noted, often have very different understandings of ethical dilemmas than ordinary people do. This difference may irritate the specialists, he said, but “it should always make them think.” Still, Di Fabio believes that we shouldn’t capitulate to human biases when it comes to life-and-death decisions. “In Germany, people are very sensitive to such discussions,” he told me, by e-mail. “This has to do with a dark past that has divided people up and sorted them out.”

The decisions made by Germany will reverberate beyond its borders. Volkswagen sells more automobiles than any other company in the world. But that manufacturing power comes with a complicated moral responsibility. What should a company do if another country wants its vehicles to reflect different moral calculations? Should a Western car de-prioritize the young in an Eastern country? Shariff leans toward adjusting each model for the country where it’s meant to operate. Car manufacturers, he thinks, “should be sensitive to the cultural differences in the places they’re instituting these ethical decisions.” Otherwise, the algorithms they export might start looking like a form of moral colonialism. But Di Fabio worries about letting autocratic governments tinker with the code. He imagines a future in which China wants the cars to favor people who rank higher in its new social-credit system, which scores citizens based on their civic behavior."

Interview: Ai Weiwei: 'The mood in Germany is like the 1930s'; The Guardian, December 9, 2018

Kate Connolly, The Guardian; Interview: Ai Weiwei: 'The mood in Germany is like the 1930s'

"Ai took his nine-year-old son with him on a recent trip to Bangladesh – about which he is making a film – just as he has to other investigations, such as to Mexico, to investigate the 43 students who disappeared in a single day in 2014.

“He’s been with me to visit most refugee camps I’ve been to, as well as the poorest ghettos in Mexico, and cartel areas, the island of Lesbos in Greece. I don’t want to teach him anything, but by being exposed to this kind of information he has developed a basic sensitivity of what’s right or wrong. And he sees me arguing a lot with people.”"

Publishers Escalate Legal Battle Against ResearchGate; Inside Higher Ed, October 4, 2018

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed; Publishers Escalate Legal Battle Against ResearchGate

"The court documents, obtained by Inside Higher Ed from the U.S. District Court in Maryland, include an “illustrative” but “not exhaustive list” of 3,143 research articles the publishers say were shared by ResearchGate in breach of copyright protections. The publishers suggest they could be entitled to up to $150,000 for each infringed work -- a possible total of more than $470 million.

This latest legal challenge is the second that the publishers have filed against ResearchGate in the last year. The first lawsuit, filed in Germany in October 2017, is ongoing. Inside Higher Ed was unable to review court documents for the European lawsuit.

The U.S. lawsuit is the latest development in a long and increasingly complex dispute between some academic publishers and the networking site."

How do you stop fake news? In Germany, with a law.; Washington Post, April 5, 2017

Anthony Faiola and Stephanie Kirchner, Washington Post; How do you stop fake news? In Germany, with a law.

"Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, the measure would compel large outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to rapidly remove fake news that incites hate, as well as other “criminal” content, or face fines as high as 50 million euros ($53 million)."

Germany’s Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of ‘Mein Kampf’; New York Times, 1/3/17

Melissa Eddy, New York Times; Germany’s Latest Best Seller? A Critical Version of ‘Mein Kampf’:

"The decision to bring out a new edition of a work that advocated an Aryan “master race” provoked fierce debate before publication. One side argued the new work was an important step toward illuminating an unsavory era in Germany.

The other insisted it would only encourage nationalists and xenophobes at a time when the country was engulfed in its own debate about refugees and the threat posed by foreigners."

Facebook Runs Up Against German Hate Speech Laws; New York Times, 11/28/16

Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy, New York Times; Facebook Runs Up Against German Hate Speech Laws:

"In Germany, more than almost anywhere else in the West, lawmakers, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, are demanding that Facebook go further to police what is said on the social network — a platform that now has 1.8 billion users worldwide. The country’s lawmakers also want other American tech giants to meet similar standards.

The often-heated dispute has raised concerns over maintaining freedom of speech while protecting vulnerable minorities in a country where the legacy of World War II and decades under Communism still resonate.

It is occurring amid mounting criticism of Facebook in the United States after fake news reports were shared widely on the site before the presidential election. Facebook also has been accused of allowing similar false reports to spread during elections elsewhere."

A tale of two ethics; The Economist, 10/1/16

The Economist; A tale of two ethics:

"THE phrases “ethic of conviction” and “ethic of responsibility” mean little to most English-speakers. In Germany the equivalent terms—Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik—are household words. Pundits drop them casually during television talk shows. Hosts use them as conversation-starters at dinner parties. The concepts draw on the opposition between idealism and pragmatism that runs through politics everywhere. But they also capture a specific moral tension that is “very German”, says Manfred Güllner, a sociologist and pollster. Anyone interested in understanding German politics, on anything from the euro to refugees, would do well to get a handle on them.

The terms come from the sociologist Max Weber, who used them in a speech he gave in January 1919 to a group of leftist students at a Munich bookstore."

Re-Print of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' Unleashes Row in Germany; Reuters via New York Times, 12/23/15

Reuters via New York Times; Re-Print of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' Unleashes Row in Germany:

"For the first time since Hitler's death, Germany is publishing the Nazi leader's political treatise "Mein Kampf", unleashing a highly charged row over whether the text is an inflammatory racist diatribe or a useful educational tool.

The 70-year copyright on the text, written by Hitler between 1924-1926 and banned by the Allies at the end of World War Two, expires at the end of the year, opening the way for a critical edition with explanatory sections and some 3,500 annotations.

In January the 2,000 page, two-volume work will go on sale after about three years of labor by scholars at Munich's Institute for Contemporary History."