3 Count: Ignored Warnings

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1: Microsoft Asks to Dismiss New York Times’s ‘Doomsday’ Copyright Lawsuit

First off today, Edward Helmore at The Guardian reports that Microsoft is asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit filed against it by The New York Times over allegations that OpenAI had unlawfully used the paper’s content to train their AI systems.

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI used articles published by the paper to train their ChatGPT system and that, when prompted, the system would provide near-verbatim copies of many of those articles. Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI and was sued along with the OpenAI itself.

However, Microsoft is asking the court to dismiss the case, comparing the paper’s concerns about AI to the film industry’s concerns about VCRs in the late 1970s. That said, Microsoft does not deny that it and OpenAI used millions of articles by the paper in training their AI systems, but claims that such use is not an infringement. OpenAI had filed a similar motion to dismiss previously.

2: Pirate IPTV Co. & Seven Workers Fined After Massive Raids Eight Years Ago

Next up today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that a court in Spain has handed down fines to employees of Engel Systems SL, capping an eight year legal case that saw the shuttering of a large pirate IPTV network.

Between 2010 and 2016, Engel Systems offered a variety of pirate set top boxes and other tools to access pirated content. However, in May 2016, the company was shuttered amid a series of raids that resulted in the arrest of 30 employees in Spain alone. Though the company was closed, the case against it and its employees dragged on.

Now, eight of those employees have been hit with relatively small fines and the company itself has been ordered to pay 673,000 Euros, roughly $735,000, in fines. the judgment also included an injunction barring the company from selling any more boxes and disqualified the company’s leaders for seven years. However, no one involved was sentenced to prison time.

3: Anti-piracy Warnings Have the Opposite Effect on Men, New Study Says

Finally today, Zane Khan at TechSpot reports that a study published in the Journal of Business Ethics says that men were 18% more likely to pirate content after being exposed to threatening anti-piracy messages. Women, on the other hand reduced their consumption of pirated content by 50%.

The study shows that antipiracy messaging may have an unintended consequence, at least with some members of the population. This is a phenomenon known as “psychological reactance”, where people do the opposite of what the message instructs them to do.

The study also found that educational messages, rather than threating ones, had no effect on the consumption of pirated work.

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