The notorious political stunt operator and his partner Jack Burkman have pleaded guilty to an Ohio felony charge for trying to stop residents from voting with disinformation robocalls. He’ll pay $2,500 and may face up to a year in prison, and he’s still fighting a case in Michigan and a proposed multimillion-dollar FCC fine.
Github Copilot is an AI-powered programming tool trained on publicly accessible code, and like many AI projects, it’s raised all kinds of legal and ethical questions. NYU Law School’s Michael Weinberg comes at it from a perspective I find particularly helpful: the non-expert coder who’s already using Google and StackOverflow as a low-tech AI helper. It’s a helpful way to consider the difference between human-scale copy-pasting and the kind enabled by machine learning.
[Michael Weinberg]
Meta is betting everything on its VR and AR initiative, so I talked to Austin’s NPR station about it... and they’re understandably dubious!
Not sure how to feel about Meta’s new VR headset and the motion-captured avatar legs revealed this week?
Verge senior reporter Adi Robertson spoke to Tech News Weekly about using the device and everything we learned about Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse plans.
Earlier in the episode, senior news editor Richard Lawler discussed CNN’s NFT shutdown and why people who bought its tokens might be angry about the rug disappearing from underneath their feet.
Okay, actually I’m just glad the court is finally hearing Warhol v. Goldsmith, a lawsuit over whether Andy Warhol could fairly rework a photographer’s picture of Prince without permission. It’s a case that will help define the boundaries of copyright fair use for everyone, inside and outside the fine art world, and I’m eagerly waiting for a ruling.
[The New York Times]
Former eBay employees’ stalking campaign against EcommerceBytes is absolutely mind-boggling to me, both for its bizarre specifics (live cockroaches, a bloody pig mask), its horrible impact on its targets, and how high into eBay management it reached. Two more participants are awaiting sentencing — but we still don’t know if eBay itself will face meaningful consequences.
[www.justice.gov]
