GoKawiil
Tech News
The New York Times reported that a woman who cultivated a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, the country's top intelligence agency. The report characterizes her as an operative working on behalf of Chinese state intelligence rather than an independent actor.
NPR reported that consumers are increasingly turning to public libraries to cut spending, using them for free books, streaming via apps like Kanopy, and digital newspaper access. One example cited was Topeka, Kansas resident Izzy Rivera, who borrows books through her library and the Libby app instead of buying new ones, and recently bought 15 used books for about $20 at a library sale. The New York Public Library also began offering free NYT digital access to visitors using its Wi-Fi starting in January.
The New York Times Company is reportedly negotiating exclusively to acquire film social network Letterboxd for around $330 million, up from an earlier $250 million valuation, according to anonymous sources cited by the New York Times. Letterboxd would reportedly keep operating as a standalone platform, though the Times could add its own ad technology to the site. The Times Company declined to confirm the reporting.
The New York Times Company has reportedly entered exclusive negotiations to buy Letterboxd, the social platform for film fans, for $330 million. Letterboxd's user base has surged from 3 million in January 2021 to 28 million this April, with more than half under age 35. Film studios A24 and Sony had also reportedly expressed interest, but A24 was priced out of the deal.
The New York Times Company is in exclusive negotiations to acquire Letterboxd, the film-focused social network, in a deal valued around $330 million. Sony Pictures and A24 had also been floated as potential buyers before talks with the Times advanced. Under the discussed terms, Letterboxd's co-founders would keep running the company but report to a Times Company executive, while adopting the Times' ad technology.
The New York Times and other newspaper publishers filed suit against Brave Software in federal court in New York, alleging the browser company scrapes copyrighted articles, bypasses paywalls, and resells the content through its search index and API to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. The complaint estimates Brave has earned over $100 million from this activity while publishers received no compensation, and it alleges direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement plus DMCA violations for circumventing paywall protections.
The New York Times filed suit against Brave on Monday in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the browser company scraped its copyrighted articles and distributed them to AI firms including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere. A separate but similar lawsuit was filed the same day by the Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. The complaints also cite a Brave feature that bypasses paywalls and its practice of blocking publishers' ads while inserting its own.
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Brave, maker of the Brave web browser, alleging the company's AI tools scrape its content and bypass paywalls without authorization. The suit reportedly centers on how Brave's AI features access and summarize Times articles.
The New York Times and a group of publishers including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel have filed lawsuits against Brave Software. The complaints allege Brave scraped their websites without permission, sold access to its content index to AI firms such as Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, and built a browser feature that lets users bypass publisher paywalls.
The Wikimedia Foundation has submitted an amicus brief in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, proposing a middle ground between the two sides. The brief argues fair use should apply to certain AI training scenarios and retrieval-augmented generation, but not when an LLM reproduces articles verbatim without attribution.
The Wikimedia Foundation filed a court brief in lawsuits brought by publishers including The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, declining to back either side. It argued that AI firms should be allowed to train models on copyrighted material under fair use, but that chatbots reproducing that text verbatim to users—without honoring Creative Commons attribution terms—cross a legal line.
Nvidia responded to a New York Times report alleging CEO Jensen Huang's interactions with Megaspeed executive Ms. Huang raised espionage concerns, saying such meetings are routine customer engagements involving no sensitive trade secrets. Megaspeed said it is taking the allegations seriously, has hired outside counsel to investigate, and has notified U.S. authorities of its cooperation.