"When Donald Trump agreed to attend a dinner with the largest investors in his own-brand cryptocurrency, he transformed the TRUMP coin into something else entirely: a means of access to the sitting president. As a consequence, Trump could find himself at odds with constitutional prohibitions of bribery and corruption, experts claim.

Trump’s dinner announcement on April 23 instigated a trading frenzy that, on paper, added hundreds of millions of dollars to his net worth. Two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization, a conglomerate owned by the president, control 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, which shot up in price by almost 60 percent after the announcement. Those subsidiaries also profit from any surge in trading volume as rent-seeking intermediaries.

However, the dinner maneuver may have political consequences for Trump. In creating the opportunity for anybody with sufficient wealth to purchase an audience, Trump risks falling foul of a part of the US Constitution—the emoluments clauses—that prohibit the president from accepting gifts or financial compensation from foreign and domestic state actors. In a worst-case scenario for the president, the potential for negative optics could add fuel to calls for his impeachment."

https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-quest-for-crypto-riches-is-a-constitutional-scandal-waiting-to-happen/

The thesis that each unauthorized use of a copyrighted work amounts to a lost sale going down the drain...

"At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created similar works that cratered how much money they could make from their work. But Chhabria also stressed that he was unconvinced the authors would be able to show the necessary evidence. When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”

When defendants invoke the fair use doctrine, the burden of proof shifts to them to demonstrate that their use of copyrighted works is legal. Boies stressed this point during the hearing, but Chhabria remained skeptical that the authors’ legal team would be able to successfully argue that Meta could plausibly crater their sales. He also appeared lukewarm about whether Meta’s decision to download books from places like LibGen was as central to the fair use issue as the plaintiffs argued it was. “It seems kind of messed up,” he said. “The question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”

A ruling in the Kadrey case could play a pivotal role in the outcomes of the ongoing legal battles over generative AI and copyright."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-lawsuit-copyright-hearing-artificial-intelligence/

"Requiring AI developers to get authorization from rightsholders before training models on copyrighted works would limit competition to companies that have their own trove of training data, or the means to strike a deal with such a company. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition—higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks—as well as reducing the variety of expression used to train such tools and the expression allowed to users seeking to express themselves with the aid of AI. As the Federal Trade Commission recently explained, if a handful of companies control AI training data, “they may be able to leverage their control to dampen or distort competition in generative AI markets” and “wield outsized influence over a significant swath of economic activity.”

Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, widely considered to be the first lawsuit over AI training rights ever filed."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-and-copyright-expanding-copyright-hurts-everyone-heres-what-do-instead

The typical cost for rental housing in this economy right now? $1,965.

Holy Cow! That is WAY more than my monthly mortgage payment on a 3 bedroom 2 bath sitting on over an acre. #rent #rent-seeking #economics
Rents keep rising, but not everywhere - Marketplace

"Popular shadow library LibGen continues to face trouble. In addition to ongoing technical problems, a U.S. lawsuit resulted in several domain suspensions and seizures in recent weeks. To top it off, the shadow library was just added to Germany's pirate site blocking list, making it harder to access the remaining domains."

https://torrentfreak.com/domain-seizures-and-german-isp-blockade-add-to-libgens-troubles-241222/

Here come the rentseekers, feudal lords who extract rents from everything that moves. I don't like AI-based art because I find it mediocre most of the time. These rentseekers are only degrading the public's opinion of their work when they feel so enraged with people generating works with the help of AI tools. They're telling to anyone that wants to listen that they're so afraid of the lack of quality of their creations that they even fear that something created with the help of machine learning can make them loose their careers. All-in-all, they're a total shame for people who really love art.

"People working in the music sector will lose almost a quarter of their income to artificial intelligence within the next four years, according to the first global economic study examining the impact of the emerging technology on human creativity.

Those working in the audiovisual sector will also see their income shrink by more than 20% as the market for generative AI grows from €3bn (A$4.9bn) annually to a predicted €64bn by 2028.

The findings were released in Paris on Wednesday by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), representing more than 5 million creators worldwide.

The report concluded that while the AI boom will substantially enrich giant tech companies, creators’ rights and income streams will be drastically reduced unless policymakers step in."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/dec/04/artificial-intelligence-music-industry-impact-income-loss

Why should tech companies pay for the infrastructure work that #BigTelco companies should be doing? This is just #RentSeeking behavior.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-moves-ensure-big-tech-share-costs-telecom-networks-rollout-2024-10-21/

#UnpopularOpinion:

#ClassAction as a measure to deliver recourse against #Corporations is inherently #flawed, #unjust and cements the fact that "If the #penalty is a #fine, it's only #illegal for the #poor"!

In case you don't believe me that #ClassActions only exist to enrich #LawFirms and allow any #corporation to send out insultingly-low #cheques:

• #Valve literally changed their [luckily illegal in places with #ConsumerProtection like the #EU] #SteamSubscriberAgreement to basically force people [in the #USA and the rest of the world] to kiss their #Steam account goodbye if they choose to join a Class Action.

• #Sony's #OtherOsSettlement didn't force them to #reinstate the #OtherOs functionality on the #PS3 and only gave US comsumers tiny cheques! A core functionality that was as much of a seller of the product as #BackwardsCompatibility and #BluRay playback...

• No Class Action against #Apple forced them to #undo shit they purposefully designed into products - espechally their #AntiRepairDesign with #DRM that basically requires a RAT to authenticate parts which they do to this very day and which they literally patented...

(Don't even get me started on the shitshow that is #iCloudLock which I hope the @EUCommission will #ban as it's *infringing on #ConsumerRights re: #property and causes thousands of tons of 100% avoidable #eWaste...)

#SouthKorea not having #NetNeutrality at all is the reason why #Twitch is unavailable there, as #ISP|s there block it in their #Highwaymen-Style #Rentseeking, because paying subscribers ain't enough for those #greedy #corporations, so they just act as #ValueRemoving #Middlemen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq7weNDyzO0&t=63s

#Apple #Monopolies #Oligopolies #IP #Copyright #DMCA #ContentModeration #RentSeeking: "This is Apple's "private law" – Apple is using its "IP" (DMCA 1201, which lets it prevent its customers from choosing rival app stores) to reach beyond the walls of its own offices and into the offices of Tumblr, dictating Tumblr's standards for sexually explicit material. Apple claims this is merely a matter of "editorial standards," no different from a bookstore deciding not to shelve pornography. The difference is that in this case, Apple can block you from patronizing another bookstore, by forcing you to forfeit the $1,000 you spent on your device and potentially many thousands more in media and data and other switching costs.

But that's not the end of Apple's ability to regulate the market. Apple doesn't enforce its ban on adult content equally. If Tumblr allows adult content, it gets kicked out of the app store. But Apple chooses not to enforce its sexual material ban against Reddit or Twitter, where the policy is "go nuts, show nuts." Apple's choosing the winners and the losers here, creating the "market distortion" that conservatives warn us against.

Which brings me back to Patreon. Apple's content-based rules are mere ornaments on Apple's core market-structuring activity. The main event is Apple's 30% App Store Tax. Apple skims a 30% vig off the price of the apps you buy, and everything you buy in them:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/

Why does patron (or Amazon -- or most businesses!) even need a mobile app in the first place?! Make your site work on mobile as well as it works on a laptop and tell your users to go the web site. Problem solved. #deletealltheapps #patreon #apple #rentseeking #capitalism #android

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #Copyright #IP #Licensing #RentSeeking #ProRata: "His company aims to arrange revenue-sharing deals so publishers and individuals get paid when AI companies use their work. Gross explains it like this: “We can take the output of generative AI, whether it's text or an image or music or a movie, and break it down into the components, to figure out where they came from, and then give a percentage attribution to each copyright holder, and then pay them accordingly.” ProRata has filed patent applications for the algorithms it created to assign attribution and make the appropriate payments.

This week, the company, which has raised $25 million, launched with a number of big-name partners, including Universal Music Group, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, and media company Axel Springer. In addition, it has made deals with authors with large followings, including Tony Robbins, Neal Postman, and Scott Galloway. (It has also partnered with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.)"

https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gross-prorata-generative-ai-business/

A very important thread. Sysadmins describing the horror of datamining raids by AI bots.

https://chaos.social/@leah/112871670828981320

What I find alarming/interesting is that the smaller sites face even more raids than bigger ones. They are literally stealing from the masses, and will then sell all this back to us in the form of some LLM product or another.