• On Wednesday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel upheld an earlier ruling in favor of major book publishers and found that the Internet Archive was guilty of violating copyright law by scanning books and lending them to the public for free.

  In its 64-page decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled in favor of the lawsuit filed in 2020 by four of the 10 largest book publishers in the world against the San Francisco-based nonprofit Internet Archive and its Open Library project.
• The court rejected the Internet Archive’s appeal which was based on the argument that lending digital copies to the public at no charge should be considered “fair use” of copyrighted content. The court also rejected the Internet Archive’s novel policy of “controlled digital lending” in which electronic copies of books can be borrowed by readers one copy at a time in the same manner readers have been borrowing print books from public libraries for 235 years.
• The appeals court ruling states:

1 more annotation...

• Britain’s competition watchdog said Tuesday it’s looking into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, adding fresh regulatory scrutiny to investment money flooding into the AI industry.

  The Competition and Markets Authority said it’s seeking comments as it considers whether the deal between the two companies has resulted in a “substantial lessening of competition” in the United Kingdom for AI services. The watchdog said it will accept feedback from “any interested party” until Aug. 13 before deciding whether to open a formal investigation.

• The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for "direct participation and collaboration" in what many critics around the world call Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week. 

    Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.

    Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has "led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure." The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS "is particularly close" and "even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians."

• <div class="mb-2 lead_post_lead_media" id="sPost_Layout_Default_0_0_8_0_0_12_0_0"><div data-attr-layout_headline="bottom" data-has-more="false" data-is-reordable="false" data-attr-layout_all_video_crop="16x9" data-block="None" data-attr-format="posts-custom" data-attr-section_url="" data-attr-filters="section,post_body_pager" data-attr-layout_mobile_image_crop="3x2" data-attr-layout_subheadline="bottom" data-source="current_post" data-attr-layout_all_headline_tag="h1" data-attr-layout_quality="1" class="posts-custom posts-custom-section section-holder clearfix" data-attr-layout_all_subheadline_tag="h2" data-attr-v="2" data-section-id="" data-attr-layout_all_show_video="true" 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quality-HD post-2668898032" data-frozen-sections="[]" elid="2668898032"><div class="row px10"><div class="rm-col-center col sm-mb-1" style="width:100.0%;"><div class="widget__head"><picture></picture></div><div class="widget__body clearfix sm-mt-1"><div class="photo-caption"><p>In this photo illustration, the Google logo seen displayed on a smartphone with stock market exchange in the background.</p></div><div class="photo-credit"><br/> (Photo illustration: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)<br/> </div><h1 class="widget__headline h1"><span class="widget__headline-text custom-post-headline" data-type="text"><br/> US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'<br/> </span></h1><div class="widget__subheadline"><h2 class="widget__subheadline-text h2" data-type="text"><p>"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," said a federal judge in the decision. 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data-source-type="current_post" data-format="posts-custom" data-attr-element_classes="lead_post_post_body" data-attr-layout_all_image_crop="3x1" data-attr-layout_custom_field_location="bottom" data-attr-header_template="jinja/post/custom-css.html" data-attr-node_id="/root/blocks/block[post_layout_default]/abtests/abtest[1]/element_wrapper[3]/element_wrapper/element_wrapper[1]/current_post[4]-" data-source-unique="true" data-attr-is_current_post="true" data-attr-source="" data-attr-from_regular_sections_other_than="breaking-news,about-us" data-attr-all_share_buttons="Facebook,Twitter,Linkedin,Separator,Email,Tumblr,GooglePlus,Pinterest,Whatsapp,Reddit,CopyLink,Flipboard,SMS,Slack" data-attr-posts_id="sPost_Layout_Default_0_0_8_0_0_12_0_1_6" data-using-stickers="false"><div class="posts-wrapper clearfix"><div data-category="News" class="widget post-partial tag-american-economic-liberties-project tag-amit-mehta tag-antitrust tag-big-tech tag-monopoly tag-technology tag-u-s-department-of-justice tag-google post-section--news"><article data-category="News" class="clearfix image-article sm-mb-1 quality-HD post-2668898032" data-frozen-sections="[]" elid="2668898032"><div class="row px10"><div class="rm-col-center col sm-mb-1" style="width:100.0%;"><div class="widget__head"></div><div class="widget__body clearfix sm-mt-1"><span data-toggle-class="with-floating-shares" data-triggers="render-rebelbar" class="js-scroll-trigger" data-target="body"></span><div id="utm_campaign"></div><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body css-listicle-body-2668898032" data-headline="US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'"><div class="body-description"><p>A federal judge left no room for ambiguity Monday in a landmark ruling in a case brought by the Justice Department and states against tech giant Google, in which the government argued the company had illegally monopolized the search engine and advertising market. </p><p>"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," <a rel="nofollow" class="rm-stats-tracked" target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/technology/google-antitrust-ruling.html">said </a>Judge Amit Mehta, who sits of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.</p><p>In <em>U.S. et al. v. Google</em>, Mehta found that Google has "violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining its monopoly in two product markets in the United States—general services and general text advertising—through its exclusive distribution agreements."</p><p></p></div></div></div></div></div></article></div></div></div></div></div>

• A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks.

  The GOP offensive started during the 2020 election as public critiques and has since escalated into lawsuits, governmental inquiries and public relations campaigns that have succeeded in stopping almost all coordination between the government and social media platforms.

  The most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. Employees at two U.S. tech companies who used to receive regular briefings from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force told NBC News that it has been months since the bureau reached out. 

  In a testimony last week to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray signaled a significant pullback in communications with tech companies and tied the move to rulings by a conservative federal judge and appeals court that said some government agencies and officials should be restricted from communicating and meeting with social media companies to moderate content. The case is now on hold pending Supreme Court review.

  “We’re having some interaction with social media companies,” Wray said. “But all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the court rulings.”

• wo leading US lawmakers have reached a bipartisan deal that could, for the first time, grant all Americans a basic right to digital privacy and create a national law regulating how companies can collect, share and use Americans’ online data. 

    

    If it succeeds, the proposal could establish the US equivalent of the European Union’s landmark privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and rein in what privacy advocates say is a lawless and unregulated space where Americans’ personal data can too easily be shared and sold to the highest bidder. 

    

    The proposed agreement would create an unprecedented, single federal standard governing digital privacy in the United States and reflects a significant breakthrough after years of stalled negotiations between Republicans and Democrats. But it could also override some of the toughest state-based privacy laws in the nation, such as in California.

• The lawsuit, which accuses Meta of engaging in anti-competitive practices, sheds new light on the circumstances surrounding the shutdown of Meta's streaming business.
• Meta, the parent company of Facebook, have allegedly allowed Netflix access to users' private messages in exchange for data, a recent antitrust lawsuit claimed. This development has come to light following Meta's decision last April to discontinue its streaming business, including original shows like Red Table Talk on Facebook Watch, citing cost-cutting measures and

• At the request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook officials developed a program called In-App Action Panel (IAAP) that they deployed in 2016 and which was in use through mid-2019, according to the documents, which include internal emails.

  The program utilized cyberattacks to intercept information from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon. The program then decrypted the information.

  “Facebook’s IAAP Program used nation-state-level hacking technology developed by the company’s Onavo team, in which Facebook paid contractors (including teens) to designate Facebook a trusted ‘root’ certificate authority on their mobile devices, then generated fake digital certificates to redirect secure Snapchat analytics traffic (and later, analytics from YouTube and Amazon) from Snapchat’s servers to Onavo’s; decrypted these analytics and used them for competitive gain, including to inform Facebook’s product strategy; reencrypted them; and sent them up to Snapchat’s servers as though it came straight from Snapchat’s app, with Facebook’s Social Advertising competitor none the wiser,” lawyers said in one of the documents.

  The lawyers, representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses Facebook of anti-competitive behavior, were describing emails they obtained through discovery.

• In the plethora of copyright lawsuits against artificial intelligence developers, a pair of complaints filed on Wednesday against OpenAI and related defendants stands out.

  Unlike most of the authors, artists and news organizations that have sued AI developers, The Intercept Media, opens new tab and Raw Story Media, opens new tab are not alleging straightforward copyright infringement claims. The media companies are instead asserting only that OpenAI and its co-defendants violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, deliberately undermining their copyrights by stripping identifying information out of articles used to train the AI system behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

  As my Reuters colleague Blake Brittain reported on Wednesday, the 1998 federal DMCA statute prohibits the removal of information that can help copyright holders detect infringement, including article titles, author names and copyright dates.