In 1989, as South Africa lost its last allies behind a wall of international sanctions, the German-born writer Klaus D. Vaqué wrote an impassioned defense of his adopted home country. His book, The Plot Against South Africa, provides a unique viewpoint: one through the eyes of the country’s white minority rulers.
Last week, we released apkeep version 1.0.0, the latest edition of our command-line Android package downloading software. Rather than indicating major changes for the project, this milestone instead signifies arriving at a relatively stable and mature place after gradual iteration on the project over the course of over four years.
What’s New in 1.0.0
We do have a few fresh features we’ve packed into this latest release, though—all focused on the Google Play Store:
In addition to the various Linux, Windows, and Android environments we support, we’re also happy to announce that since the last release in October we’ve been included in Homebrew for macOS users!
How Researchers Use apkeep to Understand the Android App Landscape
Researchers and users contributed most of the features of this release, including downloading dex metadata containing Google’s Cloud Profiles. This feature helps them use the tool in their own research of highlighting how these Android compilation profiles can be a vital source of information for evaluating dynamic testing. Numerous other projects have cited apkeep usage in their own workflows. For example, Exodus Privacy uses it to power the εxodus tool’s downloads when they monitor the privacy properties of apps. Various research teams have noted their own use of the tool in whitepapers, including one team who used the tool to download 21,154 apps in a widespread study of Android evasive malware. We are proud to provide a reliable tool in the toolbox they use to power their work.
What’s in Store for apkeep?
Our goals with apkeep have remained constant: provide a reliable, fast, and safe way to download apps from multiple app providers, not just the Google Play Store. While we’ve focused on it as the major Android app provider of choice across much of the world, we’ve expanded support to other stores as well, such as F-Droid for downloading open source apps. We’d like to continue broadening apkeep’s list of supported providers, to make it easy to do comparative analysis of apps provided in different contexts. For this, we’d love your contributions.
How You Can Help
If you’re using apkeep as part of your own toolbox (whether using it to do malware analysis, auditing apps, or simply using it as an app archiving tool), let us know! And if you like what we do, please consider donating to EFF to support our work.
We’d all like the internet to be a better place—for kids and adults alike. But in the name of online safety, governments around the world are racing to impose a dangerous new system of control. Are age gates the silver bullet to the internet’s problems they’re being promoted as? Or are we being sold a bill of goods? We’re answering this question and more in our latest EFFector newsletter.
For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue covers an attack on VPNs in Utah, a livestream on how to disenshittify the internet, and California’s proposed social media ban that could set a dangerous new precedent for online censorship.
Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we’re having a conversation with EFF Legislative Analyst Molly Buckley on why social media bans can’t sidestep the U.S. constitution. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:
Want to help push back on these misguided regulations? Sign up for EFF’s EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!
This story was originally published by Sentient.
In the early 20th century, scientists discovered how to produce nitrate from air. This was key to the development of factory farming because nitrate is a very efficient fertilizer that is readily absorbed by crops. But the following decades revealed significant downsides to the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers. Because the compounds in fertilizer can make their way into soil, groundwater and nearby waterways, nitrogen-based fertilizers have emerged as the main source of nitrate contamination in drinking water.
Now, a new report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) finds that around 18% of the United States population relies on drinking water with elevated nitrate levels in drinking water, which the EWG defines as levels above 3 milligrams per liter (mg/L).
Nitrate is a naturally occurring compound that exists in plants, rainwater and groundwater. However, the rise of industrial agriculture after World War II has accelerated nitrate contamination in the environment to levels far beyond those found naturally in the nitrogen cycle. And that’s a problem, because high levels of nitrate have been linked to increased risk of cancer, birth defects and thyroid disease.
One study found that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by just 10%, nitrate levels in groundwater would fall by up to 20% due to less livestock manure and less fertilizer needed for feed crops. Corn is a prime example: It requires nitrogen to grow, but unlike many other plants, “there’s no amount of nitrogen that can hurt the crop.” This, Anne Schechinger, who led the EWG analysis as the group’s senior director for agriculture and climate research, says, can lead to farmers overapplying nitrogen-based fertilizers to corn, resulting in nitrogen-saturated soil and, eventually, nitrate in drinking water.
“When you have a lot of animal facilities in a small area, there’s just not enough farm fields to apply the manure to dispose of it without it being overapplied,” Schechinger tells Sentient. “So you will see manure often being overapplied to the same farm fields, like in Iowa, here in Minnesota, and that can definitely contribute to nitrate in drinking water.”
In the United States, the problem is exacerbated by the federal government’s massive financial incentives for corn farmers, she adds. Corn, most of which goes to livestock feed or ethanol fuel, was the most heavily subsidized crop in 2024, according to USAFacts.
“When we have government policies like farm subsidies and crop insurance that really pay farmers to grow corn, you’re going to have more corn on the landscape,” Schechinger says. “So that’s a big driver of this problem.”
There’s little question that high nitrate levels can cause health problems in human health, but research and public policies have not provided clear or consistent guidance on how much is too much.
High levels of nitrate have been linked to increased risk of cancer, birth defects and thyroid disease.
The EPA’s legal limit for nitrate in drinking water is 10mg/L, known as the maximum contaminant limit, or MCL. The agency established this threshold in 1962 to reduce the risk of acute blue baby syndrome, a condition that’s most common in babies, in which excess nitrate leads to blood without enough oxygen.
However, more recent studies show there are other serious health risks at much lower levels of nitrate than the MCL. The Technical University of Denmark’s National Food Institute recently issued a report for the Ministry of Environment and Gender Equality of Denmark advising that a nitrate level of 1.4 mg/L should reduce the risk of colon cancer and developmental issues from long-term exposure to nitrate in drinking water.
The Minnesota Department of Health states that nitrate levels above 3mg/L suggests the water is contaminated from human activities, and those levels could rise over time. The Environmental Working Group looked at water systems with that level or more in its most recent analysis.
The EWG reports that almost one in five people in the United States may be drinking nitrate-contaminated tap water, but that’s likely an understatement, as the analysis included only public water systems. Although the majority of tap water in the U.S. comes from public water, many people living in rural regions with high nitrate pollution use well water, which wasn’t included in the EWG analysis
In Iowa, for example, in 2022, 7.6% of residents rely on well water, and in 2020, more than 96,000 wells were in use in the state. That could be significant given that Iowa has one of the highest cancer rates in the country, and a March study found that this is in part linked to — you guessed it — elevated nitrate levels in the state’s drinking water.
The post Almost 20% of Americans Are Drinking Nitrate-Contaminated Water appeared first on Truthdig.
The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack.
There’s a viral clip of Russell Brand that’s recently been making the rounds on social media. If you haven’t seen it, Brand — who is facing multiple charges of sexual assault — was asked by Piers Morgan about a Bible he seemed to have brought with him to the set. Suggesting it’s a Bible he’s also been bringing with him as a talisman to court, Brand then spent a full 90 seconds trying and failing to locate the “relevant passages” he’s been consulting amidst his legal troubles. It’s pretty hilarious, and I think most people who saw the clip will have drawn the obvious conclusion that the reason Brand couldn’t find the passage was because his newfound Christian identity (he converted and was “reborn” about two years ago) is totally fake. So fake, it seems, that he hasn’t even bothered to do the reading.
We’ve seen versions of this all over the place, and they’re not always conservatively coded (remember Kevin Spacey coming out as gay the moment he was accused of sexual misconduct?). But religious conversions have occupied a particularly special place on the right during the Trump era, and conversions to Catholicism especially. Why Catholicism specifically? There’s probably no single answer here, but it’s likely some combination of the following.
First, Protestants are more numerous in America than Catholics, and among right-wing Christians the proportion is probably even more lopsided. So there’s a whiff of hipsterism about people who suddenly come out as trad Catholics in that they get to feel they’re part of a special niche that is smaller and consequently has greater cultural cachet. Catholicism also lends itself to the kinds of intricate theological and doctrinal debates that allow recent converts to become nerds about it if they want to.
The reactionary right is fundamentally concerned with preserving and defending hierarchy.
Second, and more importantly, the reactionary right is fundamentally concerned with preserving and defending hierarchy, and a certain breed of conservative is liable to find Protestantism a bit too democratic. Which isn’t to say, of course, that right-wing evangelicals are opposed to hierarchy (just look at the personality cults built around figures like Jerry Falwell). But the Catholic Church is an ancient and unified institution with a single, infallible representative of God at the top and I think the trad Cath identity — a version of Catholicism that reaches back before the liberal universalist turn of Vatican II — holds distinct appeal on the modern right for other reasons I’ll detail in a moment.
Finally, there’s a storied history of syncretic conservative regimes that have successfully married various forms of authoritarianism with reactionary interpretations of Catholic teachings. This was Francisco Franco’s model in Spain and Antonio Salazar’s in Portugal. In Quebec, before the Quiet Revolution began in the early 1960s, it was how the right-wing government of Maurice Duplessis maintained power as well.1 These regimes have all been rejected by history, but they continue to hold profound political significance on the most illiberal and authoritarian parts of the right.
This at last brings us to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who was raised in a Protestant milieu but converted to Catholicism in 2019. Vance and the Catholic Church have been featured together in the news of late thanks to the former’s cartoonishly absurd spat with Pope Leo XIV. Leo, by way of some more context, delivered a pretty striking homily on April 11 that can only be read as a condemnation of the Trump administration’s war-making. Invoking John Paul II’s critical remarks about the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the first pope to have been born in the United States then said this:
Prayer teaches us how to act. In prayer, our limited human possibilities are joined to the infinite possibilities of God. Thoughts, words and deeds then break the demonic cycle of evil and are placed at the service of the kingdom of God — a kingdom in which there is no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit; but only dignity, understanding and forgiveness. It is here that we find a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive. The balance within the human family has been severely destabilized. Even the holy name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death. … Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!
Vance’s response, appropriately delivered in a Fox News interview several days later, was simply incredible — not just because he’s a Catholic convert but because it also sounded indistinguishable from something you can imagine him saying about a member of the Democratic leadership in a slightly generous mood: “We can respect the pope, we certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican, but we’re also going to disagree on substantive questions from time to time. I think it’s a totally reasonable thing and isn’t particularly newsworthy.” Still more incredible, and for our purposes noteworthy, was Vance’s addendum that “in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what’s going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating public policy.” This was, of course, the same week Donald Trump posted (then deleted) the below image on his TruthSocial account — which self-proclaimed traditionalist Catholic JD Vance defended as well.
Where does one even begin with all this?
It’s tempting to point out how ridiculous Vance’s implied separation between politics and morality is and the extent to which it basically ignores the entire history of the Catholic Church — which has long been involved in politics for better and for worse. Pope Leo incidentally chose his name as a reference to Pope Leo XIII, who is best known for delivering an 1891 encyclical called Rerum Novarum which backed the right of workers to join trade unions.2
But what’s more incredible is that Vance’s posited separation between politics and morality almost had him sounding like a secularist liberal (i.e., morality is a private thing and the state’s job is to be neutral and guarantee as much private freedom to individuals as it can). As a traditionalist Catholic, moreover, he’s supposed to believe in the principle of papal infallibility. Is Vance implicitly suggesting that he has his own, personal relationship with God and thus no longer needs the intercession of his anointed representative here in this earthly realm? Because, if so, he seems to have trad-ed his way straight back to Protestantism. Hilariously, the cover of Vance’s forthcoming book about faith actually features a Methodist (which is to say, non-Catholic) church on its cover. Whoops.
There’s obviously a lot of hypocrisy to go round here. But, perhaps more interestingly, I think it’s ultimately a pretty powerful case study in how what calls itself the traditionalist right isn’t really interested in tradition at all. A traditionalist, conservative Catholic would be utterly horrified by Trump’s self-aggrandizing Jesus slop and would simply never assert that the pope should keep his distance from issues of morality. In recent years, we’ve been treated to a steady stream of pieces like this recent one by David Brooks — incidentally a Christian convert — in The Atlantic (some further examples can be found here and here) about the return of traditionalist Catholicism.
We’re often told this is roaring back because young people especially feel alienated by the chaotic relativism of liberal postmodernity and increasingly crave the kind of order and foundation only the traditionalist doctrines of an ancient institution can provide. There might even be something to this in certain contexts, but I don’t think it’s really what’s happening on parts of the reactionary right occupied by figures like Vance.
Here, it seems to me, the idioms of “tradition” mostly operate on a superficial or aesthetic level (think again of Vance’s book cover or Russell Brand’s viral moment of silence next to Piers Morgan) and, even there, are fundamentally irreconcilable with other ideological and aesthetic tendencies we find on the Trumpian right. In the passage below, written for Jacobin in 2017, Angela Nagle was thinking of the alt-right, but I think her observation continues to be applicable:
[The] temporary alliance of very different factions [on the new right] — the most stark being between the traditionalist right and the libertinism of chan culture — has produced a schizophrenic incoherence. The alt-right mourns European culture’s decline but has itself created the most degraded and degenerate forms of culture the West has ever seen in its own fetid forums. It romanticizes the West but hates its Christian “slave morality” and the best of its intellectual traditions. The alt-right uses the now completely bankrupt language of counterculture and transgression when they talk about being “the new punk,” which should serve as a reminder of how empty those ideas have now become.
Indeed, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the harder the reactionary right cloaks itself in the idioms of tradition, the more hungrily it embraces and channels the most dizzying, decadent and profligate features of postmodern existence — from the president’s artificially generated Christ slop to Pete Hegseth inadvertently mistaking Tarantino dialogue for Holy Scripture.
What’s really happening here, I think, is that the reactionary right’s favored language of traditionalism stands in clear conflict with its fundamentally neo-Nietzschean view of America and the world: the belief that all human relations, and indeed relations between states, are ultimately those of power and dominance. What is Trumpism, after all, if not the concerted political expression of that belief? As I wrote last year:
In its crude brutality and cold belligerence, Trumpism has no time for [high-minded liberal notions like international law or the public interest]. Its ethos, borrowed straight from the transactional worlds of reality television and market competition, is one of winners and losers; of pure acquisition, conquest and unrestrained id. These things, to someone like Trump, are the true realization of capitalist ethics and the final telos of American power. The exercise of trade and foreign policy is just the shaking down of small countries by larger ones. The state, by the same token, is a place where winners convene to extract value and profit however they can, not the institutional expression of “the nation” in abstract.
It is, of all things, under the aegis of religious traditionalism that people like Vance, Rod Dreher, R.R. Reno (editor of the ecumenical conservative religious journal First Things) and other intellectual leaders on the new right have justified their allegiance to Donald Trump: a sentient avatar of sin, vice and human depravity who would probably count among the least saintly people ever to walk the Earth.
The only reasonable conclusion to draw here is that the vital force driving self-described traditionalist conservatives is something other than tradition; less an alternative to the chaos of modernity than a symptom of its most degenerate elements — and fundamentally opposed to the universalistic aspirations of any form of Christianity worth defending.
︎︎The post Goodbye Traditionalism, Hello Jesus Slop appeared first on Truthdig.
The federal SECURE Data Act is not a serious consumer privacy bill, and its provisions—if enacted—would be a retreat from already insufficient state protections.
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of the bill late last month without bipartisan support. The bill is weaker than congressional proposals in prior years, as well as most of the 21 state consumer privacy laws already on the books.
The bill could wipe out hundreds of state privacy protections.
Most troubling for EFF: the bill would preempt dozens, if not hundreds, of state laws that regulate related topics, and it would not allow consumers to sue to protect their own rights (commonly called a private right of action). And it comes nowhere close to banning online behavioral advertising—a practice that fuels technology companies’ always increasing hunt for personal data.
The bill also suffers from many other flaws including weak opt-out defaults, inadequate data minimization requirements, and large definitional loopholes for companies.
The bill would give consumers some rights to take action to control their personal data— like access, correction, deletion, and limited portability. These rights have become standard in all data privacy proposals in recent years.
The bill would also require companies to obtain your consent before processing your sensitive data, or using any of your personal data for a previously undisclosed purpose. Absent your consent, a company couldn’t do these things.
Further, the bill would allow you to opt out of (1) targeted third-party advertising, (2) the sale of your personal data, and (3) profiling of you that has a legal, healthcare, housing, or employment effect. Unfortunately, a company could keep doing these invasive things to you, unless you opted out.
The bill would also require data brokers that make at least 50 percent of their profits from the sale of personal data to register in a public database maintained by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Federal privacy laws should allow states to build ever stronger rights on top of the federal floor. Many federal privacy laws allow this, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
The SECURE Data Act would not do that. Instead, it would wipe out dozens, if not hundreds, of existing state privacy protections. Section 15 of the bill would preempt any “law, rule, regulation, requirement, standard, or other provision [that] relates to the provisions of this Act.” This would kill the 21 state consumer privacy laws passed in the past few years. These state bills aren’t strong enough, but they are still better than this federal proposal. For example, California maintains a data broker deletion tool and requires companies to comply with automatic opt-out signals—including one that is built into EFF’s Privacy Badger.
Because the SECURE Data Act has provisions that relate to data privacy and security, it could preempt all 50 state data breach laws and many others. It could also preempt state laws related to specific pieces of sensitive data, like bans on the sale of biometric or location information. Some states like California have constitutional provisions that protect an individual’s right to privacy, which can be enforced against companies. That constitutional provision, as well as state privacy torts, could also be in danger if this bill passed.
Strong consumer privacy laws should allow consumers to take companies to court to defend their own rights. This is essential because regulators do not have the resources to catch every violation, and federal consumer enforcement agencies have been gutted during the current administration.
The SECURE Data Act does not have a private right of action. The FTC, along with state attorneys general, have primary enforcement authority. The law also gives companies 45 days to “cure” any violation with no penalty after they are caught.
Moreover, Section 8 of the bill creates a vaguely defined self-regulatory scheme in which companies can apply to be audited by an “independent organization” that will apply a “code of conduct.” Following this code of conduct would give companies a presumption that they are complying with the law. This provision is an implicit acknowledgement that the bill does not provide regulators with any new resources to enforce new protections.
Section 9 of the bill would give the Secretary of Commerce broad power to “take any action necessary and appropriate to support the international flow of personal data,” including assessing “security interests of the United States.” The scope of this amorphous provision is unclear, but it likely does not belong in a consumer protection bill.
Your online privacy should not depend on whether you have the time, patience, and knowledge to navigate a website and turn off invasive tracking. Good privacy laws build in data minimization requirements—meaning there should be a default standard that prevents companies from processing your data for purposes that are not needed to provide you with the service you asked for.
The SECURE Data Act puts the burden on you to opt out of invasive company practices, like targeted third-party advertising, the sale of your personal data, and profiling. The bill at least requires companies to obtain your consent before processing your sensitive data (like selling your precise location). These consent requirements, however, are often an invitation for companies to trick you into clicking a button to give away your rights in hard-to-read policies. Indeed, few people would knowingly agree to let a company sell their personal data to a broker who turns around and sells it to the government.
Section 3 of the bill uses the term “data minimization,” but it is done in name only. The provision does not limit a company’s processing of data to only what is necessary to provide the customer with the good or service they asked for. Instead, the provision limits processing of data to only what a company “disclosed to the customer”—meaning if it is in the confusing privacy policy that nobody reads, it is okay.
And the bill would not even allow you to restrict certain uses of your data. As companies seek more data for AI systems, many internet users do not want their private personal data to be used to train those models. However, the bill makes clear that “nothing in this Act may be construed to restrict” a company from collecting, using, or retaining your data to “develop” or “improve” a new technology.
The bill has numerous loopholes that technology companies would exploit if the bill were to become law. Below is just a sampling:
Congress is long overdue to enact a strong comprehensive consumer data privacy law, and we have sketched what it should look like. But the SECURE Data Act is woefully inadequate. In fact, it would cause even more corporate surveillance of our personal information, by wiping out state laws that are more protective than this federal bill. Even worse, this bill would block state legislatures from protecting their residents from the privacy threats of tomorrow that are unforeseeable today.
The U.K. announced a fresh wave of sanctions on Tuesday targeting individuals and entities involved in manufacturing drones used in Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.
The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has imposed 35 new designations aimed at individuals and various entities that it alleged bolstered Russia’s drone production capabilities and facilitated the exploitation of migrants, it said in a press statement.
“These sanctions expose and disrupt the operations of those trafficking migrants as cannon fodder and feeding [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s drone factories with illicit components to target innocent civilians and vital infrastructure,” said U.K. Sanctions Minister Stephen Doughty in the statement.
Moscow’s sustained attacks against Ukraine are increasingly dependent on “third-country suppliers providing key components and technical support,” the FCDO said.
According to FCDO, its new sanctions list includes individuals and entities based in third countries, including Thailand and China, “responsible for supplying drone components and other critical military goods to Russia.”
11 entities and individuals, five of whom are based in Russia, allegedly linked to the supply of drones, components, or dual-use goods for the Russian defense sector.
The expanded measures also target human trafficking networks described as “funnelling exploited migrants into Russia’s war machine.” Among those blacklisted is Russia’s Alabuga Start program, which the FCDO stated recruits foreign migrants to produce drones at a U.K.-sanctioned facility.
The European Union has taken similar steps to crack down on the flow of drone parts to Russia. Under a package adopted by the EU Council on April 23, the bloc’s sanctions targeted entities in third countries, including China, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates, for providing high-tech items used to manufacture fighter drones for the war in Ukraine.
These measures follow a February investigation led by the Belgian newspaper De Tijd along with OCCRP, the Kyiv Independent, Paper Trail Media, the Irish Times, Infolibre, and The Times detailing how hundreds of components produced by European companies are being used in Russian attack drones despite tightening international restrictions.
After the investigation, Ireland’s Prime Minister announced that his government would pursue the issue of Irish-manufactured components ending up in Russian drones.
Chip giant NVIDIA has been one of the main financial beneficiaries in the artificial intelligence boom.
Revenue surged due to high demand for its AI-learning chips and data center services, and the end doesn’t appear to be in sight.
Besides selling the most sought-after hardware, NVIDIA is also developing its own models, including NeMo Megatron models. These were trained using NVIDIA’s own hardware and with help from large text libraries, much like other tech giants do.
This includes authors, who, in various lawsuits, accused tech companies of training their models on pirated books. In early 2024, for example, several authors, including Abdi Nazemian, sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement.
Through the class action lawsuit, they claimed that the company’s AI models were trained on the Books3 dataset that included copyrighted works taken from the ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik.
As the case progressed, the authors also brought up NVIDIA’s contacts with Anna’s Archive, inquiring about “high-speed access” to the shadow library’s massive collection of pirated books.
In January, NVIDIA fired back with a comprehensive motion to dismiss, calling the authors’ allegations speculative, vague, and legally insufficient. At the California federal court, NVIDIA argues that the authors’ complaint is built on speculation rather than facts.
Specifically, the company asked the court to dismiss the direct copyright infringement claims linked to Bibliotik, Books3, and The Pile dataset.
In addition, the motion also targets the contributory copyright infringement allegations, which center on scripts and tools NVIDIA allegedly distributed so corporate customers could automatically download ‘The Pile,’ the dataset that contains Books3.
The chip giant initially asked the court to dismiss claims relating to Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, Sci-Hub, and the Slimpajama dataset as well, but it withdrew this request in March, which substantially narrowed the dispute.
In an order issued yesterday, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar denied most of the dismissal request. Importantly, the contributory infringement claim survives, even after the Supreme Court’s Cox v. Sony ruling, which significantly impacts many copyright infringement cases.
NVIDIA argued that Cox tightened the standard, requiring “active encouragement through specific acts,” while stressing that the NeMo Megatron Framework as a whole has substantial non-infringing uses. Marketing or promoting this framework as a piracy tool was needed to prove this claim, NVIDIA argued.
Judge Tigar rejected the framing. Instead of analyzing the Megatron framework as a whole, he zeroed in on the specific scripts that NVIDIA distributed to clients so they could automatically download and preprocess The Pile dataset. Those scripts have no purpose other than enabling infringement, the court concluded.
“The scripts are alleged to have no other purpose than to speed up the process of infringement, unlike the digital video recorder systems at issue in Sony Corp. or the internet service provided in Cox,” Judge Tigar wrote.
This appears to be the first AI training case to apply the new Cox standard, and the result didn’t go the way NVIDIA hoped. The scripts it offered satisfied both the new ‘inducement’ and ‘tailored to infringement’ standards required for a contributory infringement finding.
Regarding the direct copyright infringement claims, NVIDIA also asked the court to dismiss “allegations concerning its ‘use of any [sic] BitTorrent Protocol.’”
The request was pretty thin, Judge Tigar noted, pointing out that the complaint contains exactly one reference to BitTorrent. That reference doesn’t point to any of NVIDIA’s alleged wrongdoing. It’s a descriptive line about Bibliotik distributing pirated works via the protocol.
Judge Tigar refused to dismiss all BitTorrent allegations, stressing that “BitTorrent is merely a tool, not a library or dataset.” He also offered a rather colorful analogy.
“Asking to dismiss allegations concerning BitTorrent is like asking to dismiss allegations concerning paintbrushes in a case about a dolphin painting,” the order reads, citing Folkens v. Wyland Worldwide, a copyright dispute over a painting of two dolphins crossing underwater.
NVIDIA’s interest in stripping BitTorrent from the case is easier to understand in light of Meta’s troubles in a parallel AI lawsuit. There, Meta’s BitTorrent seeding resulted in direct copyright infringement claims. NVIDIA appears to have wanted that door closed before discovery could open it.
NVIDIA did get a small win as Judge Tigar dismissed the vicarious copyright infringement claim.
To state that claim, the authors needed to plausibly allege that NVIDIA had both the legal right to control the direct infringers and a direct financial interest in the infringement. Tigar found neither was adequately pleaded, but allowed the authors 21 days to address the deficiencies and refile.
For now, it is clear that this legal battle between the authors and NVIDIA is far from over.
The same also applies to a long list of other AI training lawsuits, which continue to grow every month. That includes a lawsuit filed against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg yesterday by major publishers, which, like many others, also accuses Meta of training on pirated books.
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A copy of U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar’s order on NVIDIA’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.