Tootfinder

A US judge has said that Meta’s use of copyrighted books to train its AI models constitutes "fair use" under US copyright law. It follows a similar judgement about Anthropic earlier this week, and will come as disappointment to authors and other creators looking for compensation in what they see as use of their work without permission.

Meta’s AI training on copyrighted content is ‘fair use’, US judge says
But creators could have grounds for complaint in future cases they can prove market dilution and unfair competition, judge adds.

Let‘s train an #AI which will output copyrighted work if asked to.
Judge Alsup: Training AI On Copyrighted Works? Fair Use. Building Pirate Libraries? Not So Much https://www.…

A US judge rules Anthropic use of copyrighted books to train AI was fair use, but its storage of pirated books in a "central library" used for training was not (Olivia Sophie Rafferty/ai fray)
https://aifra…

A US judge rules Anthropic use of copyrighted books to train AI was fair use, but its storage of pirated books in a "central library" used for training was not (Olivia Sophie Rafferty/ai fray)
https://aifra…

A US judge rules that Meta's use of books to train AI is protected by fair use but says his opinion is more a reflection of the plaintiffs' poor arguments (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-op

Meta Beats Copyright Suit From Authors Over AI Training on Books
Meta Platforms Inc. escaped a first-of-its-kind copyright lawsuit from a group of authors who alleged the tech giant hoovered up millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its generative AI model called Llama.

Federal judge concludes that using copyrighted works to train generative A.I. is transformative and ultimately a fair use.
#AI

Bartz

Fair Allocation with Money: What is Your Objective?
Noga Klein Elmalem, Rica Gonen, Erel Segal-Halevi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18794 https://

Fair Allocation with Money: What is Your Objective?
When allocating indivisible items, there are various ways to use monetary transfers for eliminating envy. Particularly, one can apply a balanced vector of transfer payments, or charge each agent a positive amount, or -- contrarily -- give each agent a positive amount as a ``subsidy''. In each model, one can aim to minimize the amount of payments used; this aim translates into different optimization objectives in each setting. This note compares the various models, and the relations between uppe…

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-training-ai-on-authors-books-is-legal-but-pirating-them-is-not/

That a judge makes a comment like this so early in the process gives me hope that there will be a favorable outcome for writers whose work was pirated. Like me.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/jud…

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use”
Judge downplayed Meta’s “messed up” torrenting in lawsuit over AI training.

Good idea, perhaps the Commission could put this vision into practice for #EV roaming, so that the #AFIR provisions do not remain a dead letter?
From: @…

European Commission (@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu)
Attached: 1 image 🛬 Plane lands. Flight mode off. 💬 “Welcome to Italy! Use your mobile plan just like at home.” 8 years of free EU roaming – we've come a long way: → 2000s: €0.50–€1/min calls → 2007: roaming caps → 2017: the end of roaming charges → 2022: the improved “Roam like at home” pack extended to 2032, bringing: 🌐 Fast 5G access across the EU 💰 Protection from unexpected charges 🆘 Better access to emergency services Fair for opera…

Just received a friend request on Facebook by someone named Peter Waldmeier.
https://www.facebook.com/peter.waldmeier.865
He seemed such a nice person, I think he is a model in a Scandinavian country.
When I asked him why he was sending me a friend request he go…

Sonnet 021 - XXI
So is it not with me as with that Muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
O! let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then bel…

to be fair, some of the blame probably goes to the dark ages when CD use had faded, but online streaming hadn't really kicked into full gear

CO-VADA: A Confidence-Oriented Voice Augmentation Debiasing Approach for Fair Speech Emotion Recognition
Yun-Shao Tsai, Yi-Cheng Lin, Huang-Cheng Chou, Hung-yi Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06071

CO-VADA: A Confidence-Oriented Voice Augmentation Debiasing Approach for Fair Speech Emotion Recognition
Bias in speech emotion recognition (SER) systems often stems from spurious correlations between speaker characteristics and emotional labels, leading to unfair predictions across demographic groups. Many existing debiasing methods require model-specific changes or demographic annotations, limiting their practical use. We present CO-VADA, a Confidence-Oriented Voice Augmentation Debiasing Approach that mitigates bias without modifying model architecture or relying on demographic information. CO-…

Machine Learning for the Cluster Reconstruction in the CALIFA Calorimeter at R3B
Tobias Jenegger, Nicole Hartman, Roman Gernhaeuser, Lukas Heinrich, Laura Fabbietti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09088

Machine Learning for the Cluster Reconstruction in the CALIFA Calorimeter at R3B
The R3B experiment at FAIR studies nuclear reactions using high-energy radioactive beams. One key detector in R3B is the CALIFA calorimeter consisting of 2544 CsI(Tl) scintillator crystals designed to detect light charged particles and gamma rays with an energy resolution in the per cent range after Doppler correction. Precise cluster reconstruction from sparse hit patterns is a crucial requirement. Standard algorithms typically use fixed cluster sizes or geometric thresholds. To enhance perfor…

Sonnet 078 - LXXVIII
So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned's wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
In o…

Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond
Yuanyuan Wang, Tianze Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24321 https://arxiv.or…

Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond
In an online fair allocation problem, a sequence of indivisible items arrives online and needs to be allocated to offline agents immediately and irrevocably. In our paper, we study the online allocation of either goods or chores. We adapt popular fairness notions, including envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and maximin share fairness (MMS), and use utilitarian social welfare (USW) to measure efficiency. For both settings of items, we present a series of positive results regarding the existence…

Sonnet 078 - LXXVIII
So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned's wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
In o…