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Scammers exploit Instagram's copyright system to extort creators for account restoration

Instagram creators report losing significant income after scammers filed fraudulent copyright claims against their accounts, then demanded payment to retract them. One creator with 1.5 million followers paid $50 to a scammer to avoid weeks of lost income while waiting for Meta's official appeal process. Meta says it has restored affected content and added new protections after reviewing the reports.

Authors dispute publisher claims on Anthropic's $1.5B book piracy settlement

As payments begin from Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over pirated training data, some authors say publishers and literary agents are wrongly claiming their share of the $3,000-per-book payouts. Writers including April Henry report publishers claiming full payments or rights to books whose rights had reverted to the author years earlier. Watchdog Victoria Strauss says the pattern likely stems from sloppy recordkeeping rather than deliberate wrongdoing, and some publishers have already asked Anthropic to correct the errors.

Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft over AI training data

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming their journalism was used without permission to train AI models and is often reproduced verbatim in chatbot responses. Microsoft was named as a defendant because its Copilot tool relies on OpenAI's technology, and the outlets are seeking destruction of any copied works, datasets, and models built from them.

Developer switches default open-source license to EU's EUPL-1.2

A veteran software publisher with 28 years of experience has moved from permissive licenses like LGPLv2 and MIT to the EUPL-1.2, a strong copyleft license issued by the European Union. The change closes what the developer calls the 'SaaS loophole,' requiring companies to share modifications even when software is only used as a service rather than distributed.

Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training data

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a joint lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies scraped their copyrighted articles, bypassing paywalls, to train generative AI models. The publishers claim this practice has hurt their revenue by diverting readers to AI-generated summaries and has produced false information wrongly attributed to their outlets.

Indie developer republishes out-of-print novel 'Professor Mmaa's Lecture' via small press

A solo game developer has taken on publishing as a side project, tracking down the rights holder to bring the out-of-print book 'Professor Mmaa's Lecture' back into circulation. The developer negotiated rights, drafted a contract using the Authors Guild's model agreement as inspiration (with help from Claude AI), and corrected Amazon's mistaken assumption that the book was public domain.

Tetris Company distances itself from White House's Build the Wall arcade game

The Tetris Company publicly denied any involvement in Build the Wall, an immigration-themed browser game released by the White House that closely mimics Tetris's falling-block mechanics. Instead of clearing lines, players stack bricks to grow a wall meant to block a 'zombie horde' near the Southern Border, evoking Trump's long-standing border wall policy. The company said it never licensed its brand for the game and is reviewing possible copyright infringement.

Apple tests 'iPhone Handoff' to share one phone number across two iPhones in iOS 27

A beta build of iOS 27 reveals a feature called iPhone Handoff, spotted by a MacRumors forum member, that lets a primary iPhone and a secondary companion iPhone share a single cellular plan and phone number using dual eSIMs. Unlike existing Continuity tools that rely on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, this setup appears to work at the network level, so the companion device stays connected even if the main iPhone is off. The option is expected to appear under Settings > Cellular once it launches.

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