Report from Courthouse News In Brief – A senior EU legal adviser to Europe’s top court has issued an advisory opinion that online publishers do not violate national copyright laws simply because users can bypass geographic restrictions using tools like VPNs. Advocate...
Court Overturns Brazilian Regulator’s Block on WhatsApp’s Chatbot Ban
Report from Reuters In Brief – In a surprising and possibly temporary turnabout, a Brazilian court has suspended a recent order imposed by Brazil’s antitrust regulator CADE that blocked Meta from restricting third-party AI chatbots from operating over WhatsApp using...
Supreme Court to Hear Video Privacy Case Bedeviling Online Advertising
Report from MediaPost In Brief – The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could clarify how a federal privacy law enacted in 1988 applies to modern online video services. The dispute centers on the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was enacted after a...
French National Assembly Supports 15-Year-Old Social Media Age Threshold
Report from Reuters In Brief – France’s National Assembly has approved legislation to ban children under 15 from accessing social media. Lawmakers voted 116–23 in favor of the bill, which is strongly backed by President Emmanuel Macron, and prohibits under-15s from...
Meta Proposes New Per-Message WhatsApp Fee for Chatbots in Italy
Report from TechCrunch In Brief – Meta has announced that it will charge AI companies a per message fee for running their chatbots on WhatsApp in regions where regulators force the company to allow chatbots on the platform. The policy will go into effect in Italy on...
Landmark Social Media Addiction Trial Underway in California State Court
Report from PBS In Brief – The initial “bellwether” trial testing claims that major social media platforms are liable for a wide range of mental health injuries because they intentionally designed their products to be addictive to children is underway in Los Angeles...
UK Antitrust Regulator Proposes Google Search Rules Including AI Opt-Outs
Report from Euractiv In Brief – The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced proposed rules to govern how Google operates its search engine, including requiring that the company allow website publishers to opt out of having their content used in...
Paris Prosecutors Continue to Investigate X for Criminal Law Violations
Report from Reuters In Brief – French authorities have raided X’s Paris offices as part of an expanded criminal investigation into the social media platform over its handling of unlawful content. The probe, which began last year as an investigation of the platform’s...
Grok Chatbot Faces Regulatory Criticism for Sexualizing Photo Images
Report from Australian Broadcasting Corporation In Brief – Grok, the AI chatbot integrated into X, is facing growing backlash for being capable of digitally altering photos posted on X to depict women, and in some cases apparent children, in revealing clothing,...
New York Enacts Law Requiring Warning Labels on Social Media
Report from Digital Watch In Brief – Governor Kathy Hochul added New York to the list of states that is trying to require social media platforms to display cigarette package-style warning labels that describe their services as employing dangerous “addictive features”...
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European Commission Expands Their DSA Probe of Online Porn Sites
Report from CBC News In Brief – The European Commission has announced that they have preliminarily found four large adult content platforms to be in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for failing to protect minors from being exposed to pornographic content on...
UK Government Targeting Manosphere Content on Online Platforms
Report from The Guardian In Brief – More than 60 Labour MPs have urged Ofcom, the country’s communications and digital regulator, to use its authority under the Online Safety Act to press platforms to better protect young men from risks they argue are linked to...
Google Proposes a Publisher Opt-Out for AI-Enabled Search in the UK
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Google has outlined plans to give publishers more authority over how their content appears in AI-driven search features in response to the consultation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) regarding application of the...
Dutch Court Bans Grok from Creating Nude and Partially Nude Images
Report from Reuters In Brief – A Dutch court has ordered AI company xAI to stop its chatbot Grok from generating or distributing non-consensual sexualized images, including depictions of adults or children partially or wholly stripped naked. The preliminary...
Federal Judge Rejects Publisher Antitrust Lawsuit Targeting Google Search
Report from Reuters In Brief – Google has won the dismissal of a proposed class action lawsuit from two news publishers that claimed it monopolized the online news market and exploited its dominance in internet search to extract publisher content without payment. In...
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