What’s the difference between fair use and piracy? Fair use is when I use your content. Piracy is when you use my content. That sounds like a joke. It’s not. It’s how people behave. And if the entity alleging piracy is a large company, it’s a business model. I touched on this Wednesday. But the…
After a year of study and more than 10,000 comments, the US Copyright Office issued its second report on AI and copyright. This report attempts to address the question of when works created with AI tools can be copyrighted. (A third report, to be released later, will address the contentious issue of the legality of…
The em-dash (—) is getting a lot bad press these days. Writers overuse it, and not coincidentally, so do AI language generators. An em-dash is a perfectly reasonable piece of punctuation, but if you’re going to use it, you might need a little more detail on when and how. So here’s a tutorial on the…
Popular Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin announced that she’s leaving the Post and joining a number of other writers to start a subscription-based Substack channel called The Contrarian: Not Owned By Anybody. To me, this looks like the start of a rush towards the exits for popular newspaper writers and what will be an increasingly…
I readily admit that I find the special-effects and superhero movies now flooding the multiplexes and streaming services to be tedious. But I recently discovered the antidote to all that: a movie that is utterly unique, action-filled, humorous, fun, and filled with drama and romance. It’s called Hundreds of Beavers. Prepare to have your mind…
Newsletter 71. Why technology’s long-term impact is unknowable, HarperCollins pays you to train AI on your books, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s imaginary world, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Everyone predicting the AI future is wrong I spent last Friday at MIT, attending a conference called “BIG.AI@MIT” (Business Implications of Generative…
When independent analyst Zeus Kerravala wrote up his own analysis of a Gartner “Magic Quadrant” review of vendors offering Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Gartner insisted that his use of their graphic was a copyright violation. He ended up taking down the post. But the case raises an interesting question: can subscription-based research companies…
The legal future of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and nearly every other large language model (LLM) depends on one question: when a large language model “reads” and “learns” from copyrighted content, is that action protected by the Fair Use provisions of copyright law? Vendors of LLMs insist that training their products on the open web is no…
I inadvertently set off a firestorm on LinkedIn when, on a whim, I posted this: The minute I see an exclamation point in a post on LinkedIn, I immediately want to disbelieve the person sharing it and the content of what’s being shared. Is that just me, or do any of you feel the same…