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"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"WHEN 14-YEAR-OLD MOLLY Russell died in 2017, her cell phone contained graphic images of self-harm, an email roundup of "depression pins you might like," and advice on concealing mental illness from loved ones. Investigators initially ruled the British teen's death a suicide. But almost five years later, a British coroner's court has reversed the findings. Now, they claim that Russell died "from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content"-and the algorithms themselves are on notice."

"Getty points to images produced by Stable Diffusion which contain its copyright watermark, suggesting that Stable Diffusion has ingested and is reproducing copyrighted material without permission (Stability AI has not yet commented publicly on the lawsuit). The same level of evidence is harder to come by when examining ChatGPT's text output, but there is no doubt that it has been trained on copyrighted material. OpenAI will be hoping that its text generation is covered by "fair use", a provision in copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material for "transformative" purposes. That idea will probably one day be tested in court."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew - but never disclosed - it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage"."

"Just like Napster forced legal music streaming to advance, popular tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 will force us to establish AI best practices and ethical guidelines. The IP for Generative AI will continue to be debated in the culture and in the courts, and we will collectively come to agreements. The only issue is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with the rapid pace of AI."

" sex offender convicted of making more than 1,000 indecent images of children has been banned from using any "AI creating tools" for the next five years in the first known case of its kind. Anthony Dover, 48, was ordered by a UK court "not to use, visit or access" artificial intelligence generation tools without the prior permission of police as a condition of a sexual harm prevention order imposed in February. The ban prohibits him from using tools such as text-to-image generators, which can make lifelike pictures based on a written command, and "nudifying" websites used to make explicit "deepfakes"."

The longest running legal dispute in tech is almost over.

"Lawyers for the former president have claimed fair use, saying the ad was satire, exempt from copyright law, and used footage reposted without knowing its origin. They have also said Trump cannot be sued because of "presidential absolute immunity"."

"Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through "serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google - which has between 90% and 95% of the search market - has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look."