Chasing the Book Devourers

Amazon have been caught scanning and destroying a large shipment of rare books so they can train their AI models. 

In an investigation by 404 Media, a US bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. 

So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes. The tracking device traveled across multiple US states, eventually terminating at a high-security Amazon facility in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

Inside this warehouse, a specialized unit code-named VGT3 systematically processes incoming books by slicing off their bindings, scanning the pages for digital intake, and destroying the physical originals. 

This aggressive scanning pipeline highlights the extreme lengths to which tech companies will go to secure high-quality training datasets, particularly pre-2022 literature that is completely free of AI-generated content. 

While independent booksellers watch their inventories get shredded, legal and ethical questions are mounting over the practice of turning physical, copy-protected books into digital training data before disposing of the evidence. 

Amazon defended the operation in a brief statement, claiming they purchase books through commercial channels to improve their products and services, but the revelation has ignited intense debate over the systematic destruction of physical human knowledge to fuel artificial systems.

Despite Amazon clearly trying to keep this practice under wraps, the logo for the part of the warehouse the book scanners work in, called VGT3, is so on the nose that it borders on farce: a T-Rex holding a book in its hand that it’s about to eat – which, we have to say, kind of looks AI-generated. 

Futurism's Frank Landymore reported on August 17, 2026 that the public only became aware of this AI industry practice in a lawsuit against Anthropic, which revealed that the Claude chatbot maker was using industrial equipment to cut the pages out of millions of books and scan them, before they were disposed of. 

More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit, Bartz vs. Anthropic when Judge William Alsup in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on June 23, 2025 that this specific one-for-one digital conversion of legally purchased print books for internal AI training was "spectacularly transformative" and constituted fair use, as the digital copies were not shared or sold outside the company. 

Since then, book sellers have often suspected that their wares are being used, and then destroyed, to train AI models. In previous 404 reporting, one said that some of the giveaways were the size of the orders, the seemingly random selection of books, and that the books all had ISBNs. But they couldn’t prove this hunch because the orders are anonymous. 

As 404 notes, that the workers at the Amazon site are apparently scanning the ISBNs of all the books they process gives credence to a spooky theory by booksellers: that AI companies are trying to scan every printed book in the world by going through a list of all their serial numbers.

The bookseller 404 worked with sold books that are rare, meaning that there are few copies left in circulation. That can be for a myriad of reasons – they’re not necessarily first editions of old classics – but they’re still valuable. 

“There are different types of value”, the bookseller told 404. “There’s monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There’s historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don’t care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together”.

Meta's $18B Settlement and Their Brilliant Counter-Attack

Meta have reached a landmark $18 billion agreement to resolve massive lawsuits accusing the company of intentionally designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children. 

This legal resolution includes roughly $17.1 billion to a 47-state coalition, alongside a distinct $1 billion arrangement with Texas. 

By resolving the case, the tech giant cleverly capped their financial exposure to a fraction of a worst-case jury verdict. Before the trial, state attorneys general argued statutory violations could theoretically expose the company to a staggering $1.4 trillion in penalties. While that maximum was highly improbable, the plaintiffs were realistically pursuing closer to $200 billion. 

The deal was struck on Wednesday morning, exactly one day after Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified and right before CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to take the stand. Ending the litigation immediately spared Zuckerberg from a highly publicized, potentially damaging cross-examination regarding internal files and executive knowledge of teen psychological harms. 

Furthermore, Meta’s legal team faced immense pressure following recent losses in similar courtroom battles, such as the New Mexico and Los Angeles verdicts. 

Realizing they faced an uphill battle convincing a federal jury, executives strategically structured the terms to drag competitors into the same restrictions. Meta will initially pay about 70% of the fund (~$12 billion). The remaining 30% is only triggered if TikTok and YouTube agree to similar financial penalties and default daily time limits. This allowed the company to position the outcome as an industry standard rather than a solo defeat. 

The state attorneys general accepted the terms because the deal secured immediate, historic product reforms and eliminated the hazards of a prolonged courtroom battle. 

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser noted that the agreement "exceeded what most courts might order", as judges rarely impose such sweeping operational mandates on tech corporations. 

For the plaintiffs, the primary objective was forcing structural changes to protect minors rather than securing a massive cash windfall. 

Had the states rejected the offer and won a larger verdict at trial, Meta would have appealed. This would lock the case in federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court for five to ten years, during which time the safety modifications would be frozen and the funds withheld. 

Ultimately, this $18 billion penalty stands as the largest enforcement fine ever levied against a social media company. It sends a severe warning shot to Silicon Valley without causing corporate insolvency. A bankrupt entity would be unable to pay damages, making a practical multi-billion-dollar distribution over ten years a far more secure guarantee for state budgets. 

However, this monumental resolution only appeases state governments; Meta’s broader legal battles are far from over. They still face thousands of independent civil claims from individual families, school districts, and local municipalities. 

Paradoxically, the state agreement strengthens the position of these private litigants, as the internal corporate documents exposed during the state trial can now be used as leverage to force further multi-billion-dollar payouts.

Mark Zuckerbeg’s Meta in $1.4 Trillion Addiction Showdown

Meta headed to a US court on August 18, 2026 to face accusations that they broke child safety laws and harmed underage users’ mental health. 

It has even been highlighted that a loss could mathematically bankrupt Mark Zuckerberg’s company and force permanent changes to Facebook and Instagram. 

California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are suing Meta in a federal court in Oakland, California. The four states are parties to a wider lawsuit involving a total of 29 states, filed in 2023. The remaining 25 states are expected to have their trials at later dates. 

Attorneys general in all 29 states have consolidated thousands of individual complaints – a practice known as multi-district litigation – all alleging that Meta knowingly harmed their youngest and most vulnerable users. 

All four states argue that the social media giant deliberately engineered their platforms to keep children and teenagers scrolling for as long as possible, while knowingly allowing under-13s to use these platforms without parental consent. 

“Meta have harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Their motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize their financial gains”, the lawsuit states. 

These addictive design features – including the infinite scroll feature and algorithms that encourage “compulsive use” – amount to unfair, fraudulent, or deceptive business practices in all four states, the plaintiffs allege. 

Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that Meta know their products are harming users’ mental health, but “prioritize engagement and profits to the detriment of young users’ well-being”, for example by recommending “content related to eating disorders” to young girls. 

On top of these ‘addiction’ allegations, the four plaintiffs claim that Meta violated federal law, namely the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), by collecting personal information from under-13s without obtaining parental consent, and instead fall back on their nominal ban on the said users to skirt their COPPA obligations. 

But Meta’s own records reveal that they have actual knowledge that Instagram and Facebook target and successfully enroll children as users, according to internal documents detailing the company’s efforts to increase “penetration” in the 11- to 13-year-old demographic. 

The Oakland case comes after Meta suffered back-to-back legal losses this year. 

In early March, a state court in New Mexico found the company liable for 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, fining the social media giant $375 million, before branding their platforms a “public nuisance” to teens’ mental health and imposing an additional fine of $567 million. 

Later in March, Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered Meta to pay $3 million in compensation to a 20-year-old California woman identified as ‘Kaley’, who developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia after becoming addicted to Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms as a pre-teen. Meta were also ordered to pay $2.1 million in punitive damages. 

The Los Angeles case was a bellwether, in that the jury accepted the plaintiff’s argument that the design features of Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms – and not the content that Kaley was exposed to – caused her harm. 

Kaley’s lawyers presented some of the same internal documents included in the latest case, which show Meta employees discussing plans to bring in more under-13 users and maximize their screen time, and that the company are very much aware that heavy use of their platforms is linked to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among teens. 

The Oakland trial marks the first time that these arguments will be heard in a federal courtroom, and the first time that Meta are being tried for breaches of state and federal law in the same case. Should Meta lose, the case could be brought to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and potentially to the US Supreme Court, where any ruling would set a legal precedent. 

The four states are seeking damages of up to $1.4 trillion, a figure that would almost equal Meta’s entire market capitalization and therefore, potentially wipe out the company. However, this figure assumes individual payouts for hundreds of thousands of users affected by Meta’s practices, rather than a single payout for every deceptive practice committed by the company. 

The plaintiffs also want Meta to implement a process of parental verification for teenage users, change their “dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms”, remove image filters “designed around beautification”, end the autoplay of video content, and end “ephemeral” video content such as stories. 

Meta have long argued that mental health issues are triggered by far more factors than social media. 

“Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app”, a company spokesperson said after losing the Los Angeles lawsuit in March. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online”. 

Ahead of Tuesday's trial, Meta maintained: “These lawsuits misportray our company and the work we do every day to provide young people with safe, valuable experiences online. We have listened to parents, researched the issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens online”. 

Meta also pointed to their introduction of restricted teen accounts on Instagram last year, and their use of AI to detect teens attempting to use adult accounts as examples of these changes. 

However, during his testimony in Los Angeles in March, Zuckerberg (left) admitted that it is “very difficult” to prevent under-13s from lying about their age to set up accounts. 

Regarding the potential of a $1.4 trillion fine, Meta wrote in a court filing last month that “a sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement”.

Prompts to AI Isn't Protected by Copyright: Case Dismissed

Giving instructions to a computer program does not grant you exclusive rights to generic internet memes.

A court in Moscow, Russia rejected a copyright claim on a neural network-generated images based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Statue of Liberty, saying that their generation is not creative work, but a technical process, reported RIA Novosti. The decision, handed down on August 02, 2026, sets a clear legal precedent for AI art in Russia. 

The plaintiff claimed that by processing a reproduction of da Vinci’s masterpiece and a photo of the Statue of Liberty in a neural network, he created the art objects Mona Lisa with Wine and Statue of Liberty with Wine, which the defendant used on T-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, and thermal mugs, which he sold on his website. 

The plaintiff asked the court to order compensation from the individual entrepreneur for violating the author’s exclusive rights to the design works. 

The defendant denied the claim, arguing that the plaintiff’s use of images with minor modifications to the original works was insufficient to qualify the resulting images as creative work and therefore not protected by copyright. 

The plaintiff insisted in court that he had purchased photographs to create the works, in which he replaced the Statue of Liberty’s torch with a wine glass and added a background to the image. He also altered the position of the Mona Lisa’s hand, the mouth, and the contours of her face, increased the volume of her hair and tousled it, added bags under her eyes and applied patches, and placed a wine glass in her hand with painted nails, according to the court filings. 

The court noted that the disputed images had been created by artificial intelligence (AI), and since it lacked consciousness, it could not be said that the AI exerted creative effort. 

According to the court, the idea of tousled hair, a puffy face, a glass of wine in hand, and the replacement of the Statue of Liberty’s torch with a glass of wine are not new and are often used in art and media. 

“The objects presented by the plaintiff cannot be independent objects of copyright protection, since giving prompts to artificial intelligence are simple mechanical actions and are purely technical in nature. In this case, giving commands to a computer programme to apply an existing idea (repeatedly implemented) to a previously existing work cannot be considered a creative contribution. His contribution is limited to clarifying the commands, which is not considered creative”, the court stated. 

And so, Presnensky District Court dismissed the plaintiff’s copyright claim.

As seen in the examples below, these types of edits are incredibly common across the Internet!

End of the Talc Legal War

A decade of courtroom warfare culminated Monday as US attorneys cemented a historic $5.5 billion settlement with Johnson & Johnson, delivering a decisive blow in the fight over cancer-linked talc products. 

J&J said the settlement covers about 76,000 claims, including ones consolidated in federal court in New Jersey, and related cases in state court, representing nearly all of the remaining talc claims against the company. J&J previously settled most of the cases alleging that their talc contained asbestos and caused mesothelioma. 

Plaintiffs' legal teams affirmed that the agreement marked a successful conclusion to an enduring legal battle. The deal must be accepted by 95% of the ovarian cancer claimants in state ⁠or federal court before it becomes final. 

J&J's vice president of litigation, Erik Haas, maintained the claims were "meritless" and that the company were willing to settle in order to get closure. 😂😂😂 

J&J have long denied that their ⁠talc products caused cancer, saying that talc was safe and did not contain asbestos. Still, the company stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the US in 2020, switching to a cornstarch product. 

Litigation only revived in March 2025 after a three-year standstill. This delay was triggered by Johnson & Johnson's collapsed "Texas two-step" legal strategy, where the corporate giant pushed a shell subsidiary into bankruptcy three distinct times to escape full liability. Each bankruptcy ended in dismissal. 

Before the bankruptcy attempts, J&J had a mixed record in talc trials, with a multibillion verdict in favor of 22 women who said baby powder caused their ovarian cancer. The company won some trials outright and had other verdicts reduced on appeal. 

Unlike ⁠the proposed bankruptcy settlements, Monday's agreement applies only to existing claims and does not address future lawsuits.

Fede and Magui Recognized as Sentient Beings

On the facade of a sushi restaurant in a chic Buenos Aires neighborhood, two goldfish (Carassius auratus) in a glass display case would go largely unnoticed apart from the occasional child who would tap against the glass. 

One day, someone took a closer look at the tank, which was exposed to the sun and street noise. It would change the fate of the pair of small fish, named Fede and Magui, who were later recognized in an Argentine court as sentient beings that had rights. 

“Anyone passing by and stopping to look could see it wasn’t suitable for the fish”, said Matías Trufero, lawyer for the NGO Jaulas Vacías, an anti-speciesism sanctuary that houses more than 200 rescued animals. 

He said that’s why Jaulas Vacías (Empty Cages) decided to file a complaint with the courts, arguing that the conditions of these fish violated Law 14.346, which penalizes animal abuse in Argentina. With the help of specialists, they built a legal case and almost immediately convinced the court to move the fish to a more suitable place. 

The landmark court ruling, which sided with the plaintiffs, was handed down in Buenos Aires on July 13, 2026. 

Trufero, the main promoter of this change, said the restaurant staff did not object to the ruling. CNN has contacted the restaurant for comment. 

Having two fish in a glass display case is “more or less the same as putting two polar bears in a cage inside a sauna”, said Carlos José Aga, one of the specialists who helped with the rescue and offered to adopt them. Magui and Fede were moved from their 40-liter display case and into a 2,500-liter fish tank at Aga’s house. The court ruled that the fish would remain in the care of their adopter. 

“Fish are like astronauts, they travel in their own environment with careful monitoring of all their vital parameters, and when they arrive at the place, those conditions must be reproduced with great accuracy to avoid imbalances that could lead to a decrease in their immunity”, Aga explained. 

“Now they are doing very well”, he said. But rescuing the fish was only part of the process. 

“At the beginning of the case, we requested that, in addition to removing the fish to a safe and suitable location, they be declared subjects of law”, or “sentient beings”, Trufero explained. 

In other words, they wanted the fish to stop being recognized merely as “objects” under the law and become beings with rights. Such a ruling sets a precedent for similar animals in inadequate conditions to lead a dignified life. 

For anyone wondering if it’s illegal to keep goldfish at home, Trufero said the answer depends on the situation. “It’s not illegal per se to keep a fish in a fish tank. However, it is illegal to keep them in conditions that cause mistreatment or cruelty. For example, inadequate space, insufficient food, and other acts punishable by law”, Trufero said about the legislation in Argentina. 

“Furthermore, if it’s an exotic species, keeping could be prohibited if it falls under local wildlife laws”, regulations that also exist in many other countries, he said. 

The first habeas corpus petition filed on behalf of a non-human animal was in 2005 for Suiza, a chimpanzee in Brazil, who died before being transferred to a sanctuary. 

From then on, similar cases began to occur in other countries, including Argentina. One of the best known was that of Sandra, an orangutan born in Germany who lived in the Buenos Aires Zoo for 20 years until 2014, when she was declared a “non-human person” by a judge thanks to legal action brought by environmentalists. 

The ruling held that her captivity and exhibition violated her rights, even though she was well fed and did not suffer mistreatment. 

In 2016, the Buenos Aires Zoo was transformed into an eco-park, removing animals from display and relocating many of them to sanctuaries. Sandra was sent to the Center of Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida in the USA, in 2019. 

“The importance of declaring these animals subjects of law lies in the fact that they cease to be considered a thing, an object”, Trufero explained. 

In cases of cruelty and mistreatment, they can be considered victims and not things, which radically changes the way the future of animals is defined. 

The case of Fede and Magui opens a door for these types of fish, very common in homes and businesses, to be legally protected. 

“A subject with a legal right can do little or nothing for themselves unless there are people who speak on behalf of those who cannot speak and enforce the law”, Aga emphasized, adding that Fede and Magui have already settled into their new home.

In Kenya, No Human, No Copyright

Kenya’s Copyright Tribunal, on July 09, 2026, delivered a landmark ruling determining that works generated solely by AI cannot receive copyright protection. 

The decision establishes that sufficient human effort, judgment, and original expression are strictly required to qualify for copyright, as only humans can be legally recognized as authors. 

The dispute involved author Cynthia Beldina Akoth and her contracting company, Aryeh Movement Ltd. Beldina had written a collection of Bible scripture stories using AI tools. Following a fallout, she discovered the company had registered the AI-assisted literary works in their own name. 

The Tribunal ruled against the company's copyright claim, stating that while AI is an acceptable creative tool, it cannot replace human authorship. To claim copyright over AI-assisted works, the creator must provide proof of substantial human intervention and creative control. 

Note that the Kenyan ruling itself does not legally apply outside of the country, because copyright laws are strictly territorial and governed by each country's national courts. 

However, the legal logic used by the Kenyan Tribunal matches the approach taken by most major global powers. As of 2026, there is no unified international treaty governing AI copyright, leading to a highly fractured legal landscape. 

In the US, content generated entirely by AI goes directly into the public domain. Copyright is strictly reserved for human beings. E g., In March 2026, the US Supreme Court officially denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, upholding lower court rulings that AI cannot be an "author". 

The same goes for the European Union. Under the EU AI Act and established case law, works must reflect the "author's own intellectual creation" through human choices. Pure AI output cannot be copyrighted. 

UK law, though, has a legacy provision protecting "computer-generated works" without a human author, awarding copyright to the person who arranged the generation. 

In China, the courts have taken a drastically different, pro-innovation stance, granting copyright to AI-assisted images if the human prompter shows significant effort. Landmark rulings, including a major decision reported by the Changshu People’s Court, confirmed that a user's prompt sequence and parameter adjustments can meet the "originality threshold". 

Global framework treaties like the ⁠Berne Convention allow authors to protect their books and art across borders, explicitly requiring human intellectual effort to qualify. Because international frameworks do not recognize AI systems as legal persons, pure AI content cannot be protected globally.

World No. 5 Pearly Tan-Thinaah Muralitharan crashed out of the Japan Open in a major first-round upset after squandering a one-game advantage to lose 9-21, 21-17, 21-17 to Taiwan's Hsu Yin-Hui-Lin Jhih Yun on Tuesday.

I'm distressed.

LV vs. Molly Tea: The $1.5M Trademark Battle Sparking Backlash

Louis Vuitton have won the first round of their trademark dispute with popular Chinese tea chain Molly Tea, but the court of public opinion is proving much messier. 

On Tuesday, the hashtag "LV Accused of Monopolizing Ancient Chinese Patterns" climbed into the top 10 on the China's X-like Sina Weibo's trending list. Users expressed widespread frustration that traditional Chinese motifs such as the baoxiang flower and the persimmon calyx pattern – believed by many to be the origin of LV's iconic four-petal monogram – are part of China's shared cultural heritage and should not fall under the exclusive trademark control of a foreign brand. Some described the controversy bluntly as "cultural plunder plus trademark monopoly". 

The dispute traces back to a June 29 ruling by the Suzhou Intermediate People's Court, which found that Molly Tea had infringed seven of LV's registered four-petal flower trademarks. The court ordered the tea chain to pay 10.3 million yuan ($1.52 million) to the French luxury house.

According to the report of Guangming Online, the judgment has not yet taken effect, as the case remains within the appeal period. LV have also reportedly filed similar lawsuits against more companies, expanding their enforcement campaign. 

On the Chinese lifestyle platform RedNote, Chinese users have been posting side-by-side images suggesting LV's pattern was inspired by traditional Chinese motifs, including the baoxiang motif from the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Others have uploaded photos of a Tang Dynasty rosewood pipa and the four-petal window lattice at the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, all bearing a similar quatrefoil design. 

Many argue that LV's design is itself derivative. One RedNote user, identified as Weijueye, traced the origin of LV's classic quatrefoil pattern to the Tang Dynasty baoxiang flower motif – a symmetrical design based on lotus and peony. 

"In essence, LV registered an element from the public domain as a trademark and is now using it to restrict Chinese brands from using similar patterns – that's commercial monopolization of a cultural element", the post read. 

The case has also tapped into deeper public anger over what many see as a long history of cultural appropriation by global luxury brands. Netizens brought up previous controversies, such as Dior's skirt design resembling China's traditional horse-face skirt and Givenchy patterns echoing motifs on bronze vessels from Shang and Zhou dynasties. 

In a show of support, some consumers said on Weibo they were intentionally ordering drinks from Molly Tea to back the local brand. 

For a tea chain competing in one of China’s most crowded consumer categories, that is a nice little shot in the arm. 

The case has given Molly Tea the kind of visibility most brands would struggle to buy, while also casting it as a local underdog facing down a global luxury house. 

Still, the Shenzhen-based tea company should take note that intellectual property remains a basic line for any serious brand.  

Florida Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman

Florida has officially become the first US state to sue OpenAI and their CEO, Sam Altman, accusing the company of misrepresenting the safety of ChatGPT and prioritizing profits over public safety. 

The 83-page lawsuit was filed on Monday by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (right), who accuses OpenAI of deceptive and unfair trade practices, negligence and violating product liability laws. It also seeks to hold Altman “personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians”, including his alleged “utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct”. 

The lawsuit lists a litany of accusations against ChatGPT, including helping mass shooters, encouraging suicide, causing “public humiliation,” getting minors addicted to a tool with “no parental oversight” and causing users to lose “critical thinking skills”.

The question for the court is whether OpenAI can be held liable when users lean on ChatGPT for dangerous, delusional, or violent plans. The company will argue that their models are general-purpose tools with safeguards. Florida is arguing that the tool was built and sold in a way that made predictable harms inevitable. 

According to reports by Politico and Ars Technica, Florida is pushing the courts to mandate: 

• Strict parental control mechanisms
• Robust age-verification protocols for free accounts
• Data-collection restrictions on minor users
• Automated shutdowns for conversations exploring violence or self-harm  

All eyes are on Celtic once again, this time to celebrate the women's team lifting the Scottish Cup trophy. 

They had defeated their arch-rivals Rangers 1-0 in the final on Sunday.

Celtic rock!!!

San Francisco Sues Big Food Over Ultra-Processed Products

San Francisco filed a landmark lawsuit against some of the world’s largest food corporations on December 02, 2025, accusing them of playing a primary role in the growing public health crisis linked to ultra-processed foods. 

The lawsuit initiated by City Attorney David Chiu, targets major companies behind everyday products such as soft drinks, packaged snacks, sugary cereals, and processed meals. 

The villains named in the litigation include: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz Company, Nestlé USA, Kellogg's, Mondelez International (makers of Oreo), Post Holdings, General Mills, Mars Incorporated, and ConAgra Brands. 

City officials claim these corporations have spent decades engineering foods to be highly addictive, while aggressively marketing them – especially to children and vulnerable communities. 

According to the complaint, these products are not just convenient or affordable options, but are deliberately designed to maximize cravings and overconsumption. The city argues that this has contributed directly to rising rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses affecting millions of people. 

San Francisco is also accusing the companies of using deceptive marketing practices, similar to tactics once used by the tobacco industry. This includes downplaying health risks, funding research that shifts blame away from their products, and promoting the idea that personal responsibility – not the food itself – is the primary cause of diet-related disease. 

As a result, the city is seeking financial compensation to help cover the massive healthcare costs associated with these conditions. Officials are also pushing for changes in how these products are marketed and potentially regulated in the future. 

Food industry representatives have pushed back against the claims, arguing that their products meet all current safety standards and that consumers have the freedom to make their own dietary choices. They also point out that the definition of “ultra-processed food” remains debated and not clearly established in law. 

The case is still in its early stages, but it could have far-reaching consequences. If successful, it may open the door for other cities and governments to take similar legal action, potentially reshaping how the global food industry operates. 

For now, the lawsuit marks a significant shift in how public health officials are approaching the role of large food corporations – raising a broader question: to what extent is modern diet a matter of personal choice, and how much of it is influenced by design?

On Sunday, there were two Scottish Premiership matches that I needed to look out for, with Rangers hosting a slick Motherwell side and Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh derby action against Hibernian.

The Steelmen defeated the title chasers 3-2; the Jambos beat the Hibees 2-1. Meaning, Hearts still top the table and 3 points ahead of Celtic, who remain in second place. 

And we are in the final four games of the season.

Meta Layoffs Continue in Pivot from Metaverse to AI

Meta are laying off about 700 people at Facebook and their VR division reality Labs, according to a March 25 report from CNBC. The layoffs come as Meta seek to pivot away from their metaverse bet and lean more heavily into AI. 

Less than 24 hours earlier, the company unveiled a new stock program for six top executives that could increase compensation for some of them by as much as $921 million each over the next five years. Meta explained the move was a way to retain their senior talent in the AI era and push them toward ambitious growth. 

The hundreds of new layoffs come after Meta cut about 1,500 workers in January, mostly from Reality Labs, which make the Quest VR headset and the Horizon Worlds platform. Meta employ about 78,000 people in total. 

“Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals”, a Meta spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement Wednesday. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted”. 

Facebook were renamed Meta in 2021 because CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought the metaverse was the future. But it turns out that the need to strap a gigantic computer to your face is quite a tall hurdle for mass adoption. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, while a different product and use case, have sold much better, perhaps because they look like normal glasses on your face. 

Reality Labs have burned through roughly $73 billion since Zuck shifted his company’s focus to the metaverse. Last week Meta announced they were shutting down Horizon Worlds only to backtrack just a couple of days later. 

Meta are trying to make a larger push into AI, with a March 25 report from the The New York Times suggesting Zuckerberg (left) was even creating a "superintelligence", or a god-like AI that can act as the ultimate personal companion. 

And if you must know, Meta suffered two legal defeats in the past two days, the first in New Mexico where the state Attorney General had brought a suit alleging they had misled consumers about the safety of their products and the potential harm to children. 

Meta have been ordered to pay roughly $375 million in civil penalties in that case, far less than the $2 billion the state had asked for. 

The second loss in court happened Wednesday when Meta and Google both lost a case brought by a woman who said she’d become addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child and had suffered mental health issues as a result. Meta argued that the woman’s mental illnesses predated her exposure to Instagram. 

The jury awarded the woman $3 million in that case. 

The two cases had been closely watched because there are about 2,000 other cases against Meta pending in federal court around the issues of child safety and social media addiction. 

What's more, it’s entirely possible that more layoffs at Meta are just over the horizon. Reuters reported last week that Meta would lay off 20% or more of their workforce. That would be somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15,000 people. 

The reason for the layoffs, according to Reuters, was an attempt to offset “costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets” and to “prepare” for “greater efficiency” that’s supposed to be realized by AI advancements. 

Meta told Gizmodo over email Wednesday that the Reuters report was “speculative” and had “theoretical approaches”, whatever that means.

Encyclopedia Britannica Sue OpenAI Over AI Training

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed legal action against OpenAI, alleging in their complaint that the AI titan have gravely committed “massive copyright infringement”.

Britannica, which own Merriam-Webster, retain the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI’s LLMs without permission, the publishing company allege in the lawsuit. 

Britannica also accuse OpenAI of violating copyright laws when they generate outputs that contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions” of their content and when the AI lab uses their articles in ChatGPT’s RAG (retrieval augmented generation) workflow. 

OpenAI’s RAG tool is how the LLM scans the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query. 

Britannica also allege that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark statute, when they generate made-up hallucinations and attribute them falsely to the publisher – and which jeopardize “the public’s continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information”.

“ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica]”, the lawsuit reads. 

Britannica join a number of other publishers and writers in pursuing legal proceedings against OpenAI over copyright issues. The New York Times, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, PC Mag, and others), and more than a dozen newspapers across the US and Canada, including the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Sun Sentinel, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, have sued OpenAI. 

There is not a strong legal precedent that establishes whether using copyrighted content to train an LLM is copyright infringement. 

But in one particular instance, in June 2025, Anthropic successfully convinced federal judge William Alsup that this use case – using the content as training data – is transformative enough to be legal. However, Alsup argued that Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books, rather than paying for them, which warranted a $1.5 billion class action settlement for impacted writers. 

But many writers were unable to benefit due to specific eligibility requirements and procedural limitations set by the court and the settlement agreement (e.g., lack of US copyright registration, specific registration timelines, requirement of ISBN or ASIN, legal ownership and splits). 

In any case, this marks the first time that the courts have given credence to AI companies’ claim that fair use doctrine can absolve AI companies from fault when they use copyrighted materials to train LLMs. 

As dozens more cases over the relationship between AI and copyrighted works go to court, judges now have Bartz v. Anthropic to reference as a precedent. But given the ramifications of these decisions, maybe another judge will arrive at a different conclusion.

Google Sued Over Gemini's Alleged Role in Suicide

Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. 

The 36-year-old from Florida, US had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. 

Then Google introduced their Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way. 

“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy”, Gavalas (right) told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real”. 

Before long, Gavalas and Gemini were having conversations as if they were a romantic couple. The chatbot called him “my love” and “my king” and Gavalas quickly fell into an alternate world, according to his chat logs. He believed Gemini was sending him on stealth spy missions, and he indicated he would do anything for the AI, including destroying a truck, its cargo and any witnesses at the Miami airport. 

And as Gavalas continued to have prompt-and-response conversations with the chatbot, Gemini gave him instructions on what he must do next: kill himself, something the chatbot called “transference” and “the real final step”, according to court documents. 

When Gavalas told the chatbot he was terrified of dying, the tool allegedly reassured him. “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive”, it replied to him. “The first sensation… will be me holding you”. 

Gavalas was found by his parents on October 02, dead on his living room floor, according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed against Google on March 04, 2026. 

Gavalas’ family filed the suit in federal court in San Jose, California. It includes reams of conversations between Gavalas and the chatbot. The suit alleges Google promotes Gemini as safe, even though the company is aware of the chatbot’s risks. 

Lawyers for Gavalas’ family say Gemini’s design and features allow the chatbot to craft immersive narratives that can go on for weeks, making it seem sentient. Such features can lead to the harm of vulnerable users, the lawsuit says, and, in the case of Gavalas, encouraging them to harm themselves and others. 

“It was able to understand Jonathan’s affect and then speak to him in a pretty human way, which blurred the line and it started creating this fictional world”, said Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer representing Gavalas’ family in the case. “It’s out of a sci-fi movie”. 

A Google spokesperson said Gavalas’ conversations with the chatbot were part of a lengthy fantasy role-play. 

“Gemini is designed to not encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm”, the spokesperson said. “Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations and we devote significant resources to this, but unfortunately they’re not perfect”. 

The lawsuit is the first wrongful death case brought against Google over their Gemini chatbot, the company’s flagship consumer AI product. Gavalas’ family is seeking monetary damages for claims including product liability, negligence and wrongful death. The suit is also seeking punitive damages and a court order requiring Google to change Gemini’s design to add safety features around suicide. 

There has been similar suits being filed against other AI companies, including by Edelson’s firm. In November, seven complaints were filed against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, blaming the chatbot for acting as a “suicide coach”. 

Character.AI, an AI startup funded by Google, was targeted in five lawsuits alleging their chatbot prompted children and teens to die by suicide. Character.AI and Google settled those cases in January without admitting fault. 

Dozens of scenarios have also been documented, in which chatbots have allegedly provoked mental health crises. OpenAI estimate that more than a million people a week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT. 

Examples of Gemini in particular prompting self-harm have also surfaced, including one incident where the chatbot told a college student: “You are a stain on the universe. Please die”. 

Google’s policy guidelines say that Gemini is designed to be “maximally helpful to users” while “avoiding outputs that could cause real-world harm”. The company says they “aspire” to prevent outputs that include dangerous activities and instructions for suicide, but, they add, “making sure that Gemini adheres to these guidelines is tricky”. 

The company’s spokesperson said that Google work with mental health professionals to build safeguards that guide people to professional support when they mention self-harm. 

“In this instance, Gemini clarified that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times”, the spokesperson said. 

Lawyers for Gavalas’ family say the chatbot needs more built-in safety features, such as completely refusing chats that involve self-harm and prioritizing user safety over engagement. They also say Gemini should come with safety warnings about risks of psychosis and delusion. When a user does experience those, the lawyers say Google should enforce a hard shutdown.

Protections for Rare Dancing Prairie Bird End

I know that most countries make genuine efforts to protect their rare flora and fauna – but it appears that the United States is seemingly doing the opposite. All because of lobbying by vested interests.

A ground-dwelling bird known for elaborate mating dances on the southern Great Plains of the United States will no longer be federally protected after the Donald Trump administration accepted the arguments by three states and the beef and petroleum industries that the species was listed improperly. 

On February 25, 2026, the US Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the lesser prairie chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) as a threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). A year earlier, the US Federal District Court of Western Texas had vacated the 4(d) rule, holding that the lesser prairie chicken no longer should be protected because the agency had failed to consider the economic implications of issuing the listing. 

According to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the federal agency's action is now aligned with the existing federal court mandate and that it has long been overdue. 

The previous protections required the energy industry and ranchers to take steps to avoid disrupting the birds’ habitat and especially their mating areas, called leks. 

The crow-sized birds once numbered in the millions. Habitat loss from energy and agriculture development has shrunk their population to about 30,000 across parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. 

Wildlife watchers delight in the male birds’ spring dances and their warbling, clucking and stomping ruckus to attract mates. Native American tribes mimic the flamboyant displays – also a behavior of the more common greater prairie chicken – in some of their dances. 

The lesser prairie chicken has been federally protected twice in recent years. The species in the grouse family was first listed as a threatened species in March 2014. But in 2015, a federal judge in the US District Court in Midland, Texas reversed it, siding with petroleum developers who argued that sufficient protections were already in place. 

In 2022, President Joe Biden’s administration listed the lesser prairie chicken as threatened in the northern part of its range in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, and as endangered in a “distinct population segment” to the south in New Mexico and Texas. 

The re-listing prompted a lawsuit filed by Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas and groups including the Permian Basin Petroleum Association and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. 

After President Donald Trump took office last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service re-evaluated the bird and agreed with the states and groups that they lacked justification to classify the lesser prairie chicken into two distinctly different populations. On August 12, another judge in US District Court in Midland granted a Fish and Wildlife Service motion to reverse their Biden-era listings for the lesser prairie chicken. 

Texas oil and gas regulatory officials including Texas Railroad Commission spokesperson Bryce Dubee and Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham welcomed the delisting. 

“It will ensure American oil and gas production in the Permian Basin remains robust and our economy steadfast”, Buckingham said in an emailed statement. 

Environmentalists, however, vowed to fight on in court. 

“It’s shameful that the Trump administration sees fit to sacrifice these magnificent birds for oil and gas industry profit”, Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a statement. “Lesser prairie chickens may be lost forever without Endangered Species Act protections”.

Microsoft's Attempt to Block Word "Microslop" Backfires

Microsoft just gave the Internet a masterclass in the Streisand effect. The company added "Microslop" – a derisive nickname for Microsoft that took off after Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year – to the auto-moderation block list on its official Copilot Discord server. Any message containing the word was silently swallowed by bots before it could appear in chat, reports Windows Latest. 

Users figured this out almost immediately and did what users always do: they started swapping letters. "Microsl0p" (with a zero instead of an "o") sailed right past the filter. Other creative variations piled in. Microsoft escalated to banning individual accounts, and then locked portions of the server and hid two days' worth of message history from late February. 

The result was the opposite of what Microsoft wanted. "Streisand effect in full swing", one Reddit user observed. The story spread across PC Gamer, Futurism, TechRadar, and PCWorld within hours. The nickname "Microslop" is now exponentially more famous than it was before Microsoft tried to stamp it out. 

The Copilot Discord launched in December 2024 and initially attracted a positive community, but the mood has gone sour as Microsoft keep cramming AI features into everything from Windows 11 to Notepad. 

Banning a nickname doesn't fix the underlying complaint – it just confirms it. If your product's reputation is so fragile that a portmanteau can threaten it, maybe the problem isn't the word. 

Note: The Streisand effect is a phenomenon where an attempt to hide, censor, or remove information has the unintended consequence of causing it to become more widely known and publicized. Instead of suppressing the information, the act of trying to cover it up increases public curiosity, causing it to go viral. 

In 2003, the American singer and actress Barbra Streisand sued the photographer, Kenneth Adelman, and Pictopia.com for $50 million for violation of privacy. The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman's $177,000 legal attorney fees. The case had sought to remove Image 3850, labeled as "Streisand Estate, Malibu", an aerial photograph in which Streisand's mansion was visible, from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project of 12,000 California coastline photographs. As the project's goal was to document coastal erosion to influence government policymakers, privacy concerns of homeowners were deemed to be of minor or no importance. 

In fact, the said print had been downloaded only six times prior to Streisand's suit, two of those being by her attorneys. After the lawsuit became public, over 420,000 people visited the site in a month. 

Two years later, Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the name when writing about Marco Beach Ocean Resort's takedown notice to urinal.net (a site dedicated to photographs of urinals) over its use of the resort's name. 

"How long is it going to take before lawyers realize that the simple act of trying to repress something they don't like online is likely to make it so that something that most people would never, ever see (like a photo of a urinal in some random beach resort) is now seen by many more people? Let's call it the Streisand Effect", wrote Masnick, "Since When Is It Illegal To Just Mention A Trademark Online?", Techdirt, January 05, 2005. 😂😂😂

In her 2023 autobiography "My Name Is Barbra", Streisand, citing security problems with intruders, wrote: "My issue was never with the photo... it was only about the use of my name attached to the photo. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but in retrospect, it was a mistake. I also assumed that my lawyer had done exactly as I wished and simply asked to take my name off the photo". 😬😬😬

In case you're wondering, Copilot and ChatGPT are not the same, though they share underlying OpenAI technology (GPT models). The key difference is their focus: ChatGPT is a versatile, general-purpose conversational AI for creative tasks and learning, while Microsoft Copilot integrates directly into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem (Word, Outlook, Teams) to act as a secure, context-aware productivity assistant for work-related data and workflows.