Report from Courthouse News In Brief – US District Judge Maxine Chesney has granted Amazon a preliminary injunction blocking the use of an AI-powered shopping assistant created by Perplexity AI on Amazon’s website. Chesney determined that Amazon is likely to succeed...
Utah Taxes Advertising Revenue of Big, Addictive Social Media Companies
Report from Utah News Dispatch In Brief – Utah’s legislature has passed SB287, a bill imposing a 4.7% tax on the targeted advertising revenues of the largest social media companies. The bill targets digital platforms that generate at least $1 million in targeted...
Microsoft Opposes Immediate Pentagon Blacklisting of Anthropic
Report from Reuters In Brief – Microsoft is backing Anthropic in its legal challenge to the US Department of Defense (DoD) labeling the AI developer a supply-chain risk and blocking the company’s AI services from being used on any defense contracts. The...
White House Kills Some Utah AI Bills but Several Reach Governor Cox
Report from the Transparency Coalition In Brief – Efforts by officials in Republican-dominated Utah to position the state as a leader in regulating AI faced resistance from the Trump White House, which labeled one AI safety proposal “unfixable” and warned that some...
Meta to Add Digital Services Tax Surcharge to Ad Buys in Six Countries
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Meta has announced that it will soon add a “location fee” to advertising purchases targeting users in several countries to offset the cost of national digital services taxes (DSTs). The policy will begin in May, with full billing...
AI Fears are Powering Bills Regulating “Surveillance Pricing” in US States
Report from Gizmodo In Brief – Democratic state lawmakers are increasingly proposing legislation to curb so-called “surveillance pricing,” a practice in which retailers use data and technology to help set prices, claiming that AI will be used to rapidly change prices...
Meta Proposes Allowing AI Chatbots on WhatsApp in Europe for a Fee
Report from the Wall Street Journal In Brief – Meta has announced that it will allow third-party AI chatbots to communicate with users on its WhatsApp messaging platform for a per-message fee in response to pressure from the European Commission. The Commission...
UK Government Vexed About How to Apply Copyright Law to AI Training
Report from the Financial Times In Brief – The UK government is reconsidering a proposal that would allow AI developers, including giants like OpenAI and Google, to train AI models on copyrighted materials without obtaining prior consent from rightsholders. After a...
Kochava Settles Federal Trade Commission Location Privacy Lawsuit
Report from MediaPost In Brief – Data broker Kochava has reportedly negotiated a settlement with lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over allegations that the company improperly sold sensitive mobile device geolocation data. The terms of the deal have not...
Polish Antitrust Agency Investigating Allegro for Unfair Logistics Preferences
Report from TVP World In Brief – Poland’s competition authority (UOKik) is investigating Allegro, the country’s leading e-commerce platform, for allegedly breaching consumer protection and competition rules related to the platform’s logistics services. UOKiK said...
Trump Administration “Settles” Social Media Case They Always Agreed With
Report from Reuters In Brief – The Trump Administration has reached a legal settlement that restricts three federal agencies from pressuring social media companies to remove or limit content, ending a legal battle that initially pitted conservative commentators...
Still More AI Copyright Suits — Encyclopedia Britannica Sues OpenAI
Report from TechCrunch In Brief – Encyclopedia Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster and retains the copyright on over 100,000 online articles, has sued OpenAI for widespread copyright infringement. The publisher claims that OpenAI unlawfully scraped and used its...
Judge Says Utah’s Lawsuit Alleging Snapchat Harms Kids Can Proceed
Report from Courthouse News In Brief – A federal judge has dismissed an attempt by Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, to block the State of Utah from engaging in civil litigation in state court to enforce consumer protection laws against the social media...
Ecuador Considers Social Media Age Limit to Counter Gang Recruiting
Report from DigWatch In Brief – The Ecuador National Assembly is considering legislation to ban teens under age 15 from social media. The measure broadly covers digital platforms that enable public interaction, messaging, and content sharing, encompassing most major...
Italian Court Scraps 2024 Fine Levied Against OpenAI for GDPR Violations
Report from Reuters In Brief – A Rome court has cancelled the 15 million euro fine imposed on OpenAI by Italy's data protection authority for violations of the GDPR in the development and operation of ChatGPT. The fine was issued in December 2024 over the alleged...
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