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Washington Post [no paywall] – Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles. “Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of …
The Atlantic – And that could change everything for the tech industry. Alex Reisner: “On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained …
copyrightlately: “From Nancy Drew to Animal Crackers to The Maltese Falcon, 1930’s greatest works enter the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Expect celebration, confusion, and at least one Betty Boop slasher film. Sorry in advance…I’ve listed over 150 notable works entering the public domain at the end of this article. But as always, …
annas-archive.li/blog, 2025-12-20 “We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be …
Center for the Study of the Public Domain – Public Domain Day 2026 – On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As …
The Guardian: “This past March, when Google began rolling out its AI Mode search capability, it began offering AI-generated recipes. The recipes were not all that intelligent. The AI had taken elements of similar recipes from multiple creators and Frankensteined them into something barely recognizable. In one memorable case, the Google AI failed to distinguish …
The Public Domain Review: “At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three …
Jeffrey Edmunds, TEDxPSU [YouTube] – “With the shift from books to ebooks, libraries have lost ownership of their collections. Knowledge is being privatized and monetized by multinational corporations. To correct this trend, we need to think of knowledge, especially the knowledge collectively funded and created at universities like Penn State, not as a private commodity, …
Matthew Sag: Judge Stein’s Order Denying OpenAI’s Motion to Dismiss in Authors Guild v. OpenAI, Inc., No. 25-md-3143 (SHS) (OTW) (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 27, 2025) “A new ruling in Authors Guild v. OpenAI has major implications for copyright law, well beyond artificial intelligence. On October 27, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein of the Southern District of New …
Spyglass: “A funny thing happened on the way to AI web browsers taking over the world: they’re now getting blocked left and right from doing the things that would make them useful. This is, to say the least, a problem. I first noticed it when OpenAI rolled out their ‘ChatGPT Atlas’ browser a couple weeks …
The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work. “The web archive Common Crawl has been quietly funneling paywalled articles to AI companies—and lying to publishers about it.” “The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages …
404 Media – “arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with …
