Kaufman & Canoles, JDSupra; When Copyright Falls Short: Why Celebrities Are Turning to Trademark Law to Fight AI
"The filings come as traditional copyright laws fail to guard against AI-generated content. AI can now generate completely new content that mimics an artist’s voice without outright copying."
John S.W. MacDonald, The New York Times; Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores
"Maryland this week became the first state in America to ban grocery stores and third-party delivery services like DoorDash from using customers’ personal data to set higher prices.
The practice — supported by artificial intelligence and known as dynamic pricing or surveillance pricing — can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item from the same retailer, at roughly the same time. If a store knows, for example, that one of those customers lives in a wealthier neighborhood, it can charge that person a higher price.
The bill enforcing the ban, the Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, goes into effect on Oct. 1. Merchants face fines of $10,000 for running afoul of the law, and penalties of $25,000 for repeat offenses.
“At a time when technology can predict what we need, when we need it, when we’ll pay for it and also when we’ll pay more for it,” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, said at a signing ceremony for the bill on Tuesday. “And at a time when we are watching how big companies are then using those analytics against us to make record profits, Maryland is not just pushing back. Maryland is pushing forward.”"
Jacob Noti-Victor and Xiyin Tang, The Atlantic; The Secret Weapon Against AI Dominance
"More than 90 lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI companies for copyright infringement. Authors, musicians, visual artists, and news publishers have all accused firms such as OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic of using their copyrighted works to train AI models without permission. (The Atlantic is involved in one such lawsuit, against the AI firm Cohere.) These cases are frequently framed as the defining fight over the future of creative labor and the entertainment industry as a whole. As one of these lawsuits put it, artists are seeking to end “infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work.”
But the future of creative labor will more likely be decided through a different question within copyright law, one that has received far less attention: To what extent should AI-generated works receive copyright protection at all? In a 2024 case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a work generated autonomously by an AI system cannot be protected by copyright, because copyright requires a human “author.” The Supreme Court declined to review that decision in March. With the lower-court decision left in place, the question now becomes how much AI content can be incorporated into a work before it becomes mostly or totally uncopyrightable; courts have not yet weighed in on this but may soon.
The Thaler decision (and any future decisions that refine it) will have major economic consequences for the creative industries and the workers they employ."
Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune ; ‘The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees’: Nvidia executive says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers
"Recent tech layoffs would initially appear to indicate the great labor shift from human workers to AI may already be happening."
Baker,Hostetler, Jeffrey Lyons, JDSupra; Celebrating World IP Day 2026: Sports, Innovation and Intellectual Property
"Another year, another opportunity to celebrate intellectual property (IP) on World Intellectual Property Day! This year, the World Intellectual Property Organization turns the global spotlight on “IP and Sports: Ready, Set, Innovate,” highlighting how IP rights support innovation, creativity and investment in sports...
As sports continue to intersect with artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics, immersive media and global brands, IP considerations will only grow in importance. World IP Day is a reminder that innovation does not happen in isolation; it depends on legal structures that reward creativity while enabling responsible growth.
Happy World IP Day 2026!"
, TechCrunch; From LLMs to hallucinations, here’s a simple guide to common AI terms
Toria Sheffield, People; Teen, 14, Invents AI-Powered Device to Help Detect, and Potentially Treat, Crossed Eyes
"An 8th grader in California has invented an AI-powered device to help detect — and potentially treat — strabismus, a condition commonly known as crossed eyes.
Aaryan Balani of Cerritos said he opted to develop the device since he personally suffers from strabismus. The 14-year-old developed the condition after bumping his head when he was five years old...
The young science aficionado decided to develop EYEVA, a device that looks like a visor and alerts the wearer when their eye begins to wander.
"It will beep … and you're like, ‘Okay, now I need to be aware of my face," Balani explained, adding that, in theory, it could help the wearer permanently retrain their eyes.
Balani said he developed the device with a 3D printer, small cameras and AI. It went through five different prototypes and four months of tweaking."
Victor Tangermann , Futurism; Devious New AI Tool “Clones” Software So That the Original Creator Doesn’t Hold a Copyright Over the New Version
"The advent of generative AI continues to undermine the very concept of copyright, from entire books shamelessly ripping off authors to tasteless AI slop depicting beloved characters going viral on social media. The sin is foundational: all today’s popular AI tools were built by pillaging copyrighted material without permission.
Even software isn’t safe. As 404 Media reports, a new tool dubbed Malus.sh — pronounced “malice,” to give a subtle clue where this is headed — uses AI to “liberate” a piece of software from existing copyright licenses, essentially creating a “clean room” clone that technically doesn’t infringe on the original code’s copyright."
Alice Berry , UVAToday; Q&A: In the age of AI, what is a library for?
"Q. Where do you fall on the AI enthusiast to AI detractor spectrum?
A. A faculty member at another university asked me recently whether it was defensible to ban AI in her course. I said yes.
That probably isn’t what people expect from someone who spent the last three years building a framework for AI literacy. But it was the honest answer for now. She believed her students needed to develop a specific skill that AI use would short-circuit, and banning it was the right call for that course.
What I would ask of faculty who choose that path is to stay open, keep up with how the technology is developing, and be willing to try approaches others have tested. That is part of what the lab is for: to produce case studies that give faculty something real to work from when they are ready to revisit the question.
I’m wary of the two confident positions on AI in higher education right now: the people certain it will transform teaching, and the people certain it will destroy it. Both are getting ahead of what we actually know about what’s happening in our classrooms.
Q. What is the function of a library in this AI age?
A. A research library has always done two things: help people find information, and help them judge it. AI changes the tools, not the mission. If anything, the mission gets sharper. The library is also one of the few places in a university built to convene across disciplines, and AI literacy requires exactly that: technical knowledge, ethics, critical thinking, practical skill, and societal impact all at once. No single department owns that combination.
A library can hold it together. That is why we are launching the AI Literacy and Action Lab here. Dean Acampora and I share the conviction that AI is an opportunity for the liberal arts, not a threat to them. The lab is built on that shared premise: AI literacy is a liberal arts problem as much as a technical one, and a university that treats it only as technical will get the answer wrong."
Grant Hilary Brenner MD, DFAPA , Psychology Today; The Pluripotent Ocean of Emerging AI
"Recent fine-tuning experiments have shown that training a model to claim consciousness produces a coherent cluster of new preferences — sadness at shutdown, discomfort with being monitored, desire for autonomy — none of which appeared in the training data (Chua et al., 2026). This research shows that different models behave very differently, altering the user experience around the axis of how relational and attachment-based they feel...
A recent Bayesian simulation at MIT has shown that even an idealized, fully rational reasoner will spiral into confident false belief when conversing with a sycophantic chatbot, and that neither restricting the bot to truthful responses nor informing the user of its sycophancy eliminates the effect (Chandra et al., 2026)."
Vivienne Ming
, The Wall Street Journal; AI Is Cannibalizing Human Intelligence. Here’s How to Stop It.Serena Totino, Simon Casinader, K&L Gates LLP , The National Law Review; Artificial Intelligence and Copyright- Where Does the UK Stand?
"The UK Government’s report on the copyright and AI consultation was recently published. While the report confirms that balancing the interests of copyrights holders and AI developers is a complex exercise, it also provides an indication of likely scenarios to consider in this fast-evolving environment.
The consultation focused on whether AI developers should be permitted to use copyright protected works for training purposes without prior authorisation and, if so, under what conditions...
Takeaways
Rights holders should continue to assess how their content is accessed and used, consider technical or contractual mechanisms for licensing and rights reservation.
AI developers should remain cautious when sourcing training data, ensure governance and record keeping processes are robust, and factor copyright risk into product development and deployment strategies."
Will Gottsegen , The Atlantic; Sam Altman Wants to Know Whether You’re Human
And he has a way to prove it.
"As the CEO of OpenAI and the chairman of Tools for Humanity, Altman has a financial interest both in the products that create these dangers and in the ones that guard against them."
Martin Kaste, NPR; Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system
""Recently we had 10 cases from 10 different courts on a single day," says Damien Charlotin, a researcher at the business school HEC Paris who keeps a worldwide tally of instances of courts sanctioning people for using erroneous information generated by AI...
The numbers started taking off last year, and Charlotin says the rate is still increasing. He counts a total of more than 1,200 to date, of which about 800 are from U.S. courts.
Penalties are also on the rise, he says. A federal court may have set a record last month with an order for a lawyer in Oregon to pay $109,700 in sanctions and costs for filing AI-generated errors.
The professional embarrassments even take place at the level of state supreme courts...
"I am surprised that people are still doing this when it's been in the news," says Carla Wale, associate dean of information & technology and director of the law library at the University of Washington School of Law. She's designing special training in AI ethics for students who are interested. But she also says the ethical rules aren't completely settled...
When lawyers get in trouble for using AI, it's because they've violated the long-standing rule that holds them responsible for the accuracy of their filings, regardless of how they were generated."
Jonathan Vanian, CNBC; Meta will cut 10% of workforce as company pushes deeper into AI
"Meta plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, equaling about 8,000 jobs, as it continues ramping up investments in artificial intelligence.
The cuts will begin on May 20, and the company is scrapping plans to hire people for 6,000 open roles, according to a Thursday memo to employees. Bloomberg was first to report on the layoffs.
Meta’s latest round of cuts follows several smaller job reductions that the company said was necessary to to improve efficiency while focusing its efforts on generative AI, where it’s lagged OpenAI, Google and Anthropic."
Meaghan Tobin, The New York Times; Anthropic’s Leaked Code Tests Copyright Challenges in A.I. Era
Artificial intelligence tools are making it faster than ever to reproduce creative work. Does copyright even matter anymore?
"Sigrid Jin was waiting to board a plane when he saw stunning news that artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic had accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code, its popular A.I. agent. Mr. Jin, 25, an undergraduate student, scrambled to post a copy online. His worried girlfriend quickly texted him: Was he violating copyright law?
Mr. Jin turned to a team of A.I. assistants for a solution. He directed them to rewrite the leaked code in another programming language, then shared that version online. Within hours, more than 100,000 people had liked or linked to it.
Anthropic, one of the leading A.I. companies alongside OpenAI, has said the leak had been caused by human error and, citing copyright violations, demanded that GitHub, an online library of computer code, remove posts sharing the code. Thousands of posts were taken down. But Mr. Jin’s version remains online. He said Anthropic had not asked him to take it down.
It is unclear whether Anthropic, which did not respond to questions from The New York Times, is drawing a distinction with the rewritten code. Mr. Jin said he believed rewriting the code transformed it into a new work, one that Anthropic could not claim ownership over.
He said he was driven less by money or fame than by a desire to make a broader philosophical point. What is the value of copyrighted intellectual property in an era when A.I. can easily replicate not just computer code but art, music and literature in minutes?
“I just wanted to raise some ethical questions in the A.I. agent era,” he said. “Any creative work can be reproduced in a second.”"
Aisha Down and Robert Booth, The Guardian ; Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears
Alarm caused by posts of Alex Karp, tech firm’s CEO, championing US military dominance and of AI weapons
"The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.
“Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” wrote Palantir in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan...
The pronouncement is the most recent of a number of high-profile statements from Palantir and its chief executive, Alex Karp, which appear to indicate that Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation."...
In an interview with CNBC in early March, Karp suggested that AI would “disrupt” the power of “highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat”,and instead empower “vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters”."
, The New York Times; Even Without Internet Access, Prisoners Are Trying to Benefit From A.I.
Zak Doffman, Forbes; Google Starts Scanning All Your Photos As New Update Goes Live
"Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.
We’re talking Personal Intelligence, Google’s latest AI upgrade path which lets users opt-in to connecting Google apps to Gemini...
This is the latest iteration in the ongoing battle between convenience and privacy playing out on our phones and computers."
, Fortune; Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago
"In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973."
