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Anthropic Sued By Sony, Warner For Allegedly Stealing Tens of Thousands of Songs, Torrenting Copyrighted Works

Axios reports:


Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."


The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology... The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it's broad. It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works. BMG's lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions.


What they're saying: "Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models," the plaintiffs write in the 48-page complaint. They also claim that Anthropic pirated thousands of copyrighted musical works...

More details from The Verge:


The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner's favor and awards the maximum amount...

The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's 88-year-old Ridley Scott Doing Now?

The Los Angeles Times first calls Ridley Scott's newest movie "a postapocalyptic thriller that trades zombies for pandemics and asks whether hope can outlast catastrophe." But besides
The Dog Stars, Scott is also working on an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" starring Hugh Jackman, and is thinking about turning one of his past films into a musical. ("I can't tell you which one because they're being difficult.") The common theme, they suggest, is a director who allows his stories to "speak through evocative, immersive images rather than unnecessary exposition."




The British director says it's because he got his start in advertising after attending the Royal College of Art in London. After 1982's neon-coated sci-fi thriller "Blade Runner," Scott notably made the iconic Apple Macintosh computer ad "1984," a memorable Orwellian-themed clip that contained suggestions of the dystopias that would continue to fascinate Scott in his filmmaking. "Advertising in England at that point became a competitive art form," he says, pointing to the notorious "Adland Five," a group of directors that included Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Scott and his brother Tony. "I've got a show reel which is 50 years old which would entertain the s — out you. Hasn't aged at all. Our visual drive changed the face of how films looked."
That's apparent in Scott's latest, "The Dog Stars" (in theaters Friday), a film about survival after the end of the world. It's based on Peter Heller's 2012 novel and set in Colorado 10 years in the future after an aggressive flu has decimated much of the population. Those remaining alive use any means necessary to stay that way, resulting in instability, brutality and, more hopefully, connection...
These days, Scott develops movies with his production company, Scott Free, which he founded with his late brother Tony in 1995. Before that he says he struggled to find good scripts. And rarely has someone handed one to him. "I've only ever had three films land on my desk," he says. "One was 'Alien,' which I was fifth choice for after Robert Altman." He makes a face. "Can you imagine offering Robert Altman 'Alien'? How stupid can you get?"
Another was 2015 space adventure "The Martian," which Scott says had been sitting on a shelf for two years before it was sent to him. Scott's grounded, semi-comedic take on Andy Weir's novel resulted in seven Oscar nominations. The third screenplay to materialize was "The Dog Stars." "I read it and I was blown away," Scott says.

Deadline notes that Scott is already re-writing the third prequel to Alien, citing Scott's comments to French outlet AlloCiné.

"The one that just came out [2024's Alien: Romulus] was OK. I think it needs some help. So, I've gone back in." Scott continued, "I've already got a footprint for the next Alien.... I'm picking up where we left off in Covenant with Micheal Fassbender, who now thinks he's Ozymandius." With the sequel bringing back Fassbender's futuristic AI droid, Scott sees an opportunity to explore the repercussions of artificial intelligence in our current world. "I like the fact that AI has gone off the rails," said Scott of where the character is at the end of Covenant. "If we go AI, the moment we discover it's off the rails is too late. It could switch every digital thing off in the world like that. You'd have fucking chaos. It's that kind of stuff that's scary."

Scott tells the Los Angeles Times that the malfunctioning AI character fascinates him, and in the movie will be creating a "brave new world for himself... AIs can go off. And if they do, it's like a bomb..."

So far, Scott says he hasn't implemented AI technologies into his filmmaking. He holds up his "Treasure Island" Ridleygrams [hand-drawn storyboards] and shakes them at the camera. "I can compete with an AI without any problem making images," he says. "But it's coming, inevitably."
Scott was not involved in the forthcoming Prime Video series "Blade Runner 2099," out in November. "I can't blame my lawyers and my agents at that time, but somehow we let 'Blade Runner' go," he says. "And when you're not the author of the actual written word, you don't have a piece." (He was more involved in Noah Hawley's recent "Alien: Earth" series, which he calls "pretty damn good....")

Does that mean he thinks about his legacy as a filmmaker? He does, but not often. "When you think of your legacy, you're too near the end," Scott says. "I'm not near the end." He looks up from his drawings. "I've had a riotous time," he says. He corrects himself: "I'm having a riotous time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the Snip of a Gene, Scientists Hope To Erase High Cholesterol For Life

CNN reports that "A one-time snip of a key gene lowered heart-clogging cholesterol by about 50% over an entire year with no adverse effects, scientists have reported."

The overwhelmingly positive results were found in four people who had taken the highest dose of the experimental treatment during a pilot study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in November 2025. That study was extremely small — only 15 patients with dangerously high cholesterol that did not respond to medication. The research was designed to test the safety of five different doses of a gene-altering infusion delivered by CRISPR-Cas9, a biological scissor which cuts a targeted genetic location to modify or turn a gene on or off. "If you'd asked me 15 years ago if we could have done something like this, I would have thought you were crazy," senior study author Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told CNN previously.



An update on the study, published Friday in NEJM, appears to answer a key question: Does the intervention last? "Is something like this truly a one and done? That was always the question," said lead study author Dr. Luke Laffin, a preventive cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic's Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. "This new data is essentially saying that the decreases in LDL cholesterol and triglycerides we saw at 60 days after treatment have lasted over a year," Laffin said. "In people who took the highest dose, the reduction seems durable and safe...."

If larger clinical trials show similar results, the procedure could be a game changer for young people with severe disease, preventive cardiologist Dr. Ann Marie Navar, an associate professor of cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told CNN previously. "If you're 20 and you have really high cholesterol, it may make a lot more sense to have a one-time treatment that doesn't require you to have to take a pill every single day or shot every two weeks for the next 60 years," said Navar, who was not involved in the study. "The potential for this is just enormous."

Being born with this mutation naturally "drastically lowers or even eliminates a person's risk for heart disease," the article points out. And the study's senior author adds "now that CRISPR is here, we have the ability to change other people's genes so they too can have this protection."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of Cars Recalled Over Danger of Bursting Into Flames. But They're Not EVs.

The Washington Post shares this tip for car buyers.


Electric vehicles "are not driving the recent growth in recalls warning that vehicles could erupt into flames at any time, even when parked and turned off."

A Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall notices found that conventional gas and diesel vehicles made up the vast majority of vehicles covered by the "park outside" label since 2021.


Last week, The Post wrote about an alarming surge in these so-called "park outside" recalls... A total of an estimated 3.4 million vehicles currently have outstanding recalls of this kind, according to vehicle history provider CarFax.
Safety experts say the surge in "park outside" recalls appears to be caused by other changes to modern gas and electric vehicles, such as the additional technology in everything from transmissions to seat warmers.... [It's a messy mix of things that "doesn't lend itself to simple description of what's happening," says Sean Kane, president of auto safety-analysis firm Safety Research and Strategies. "But it boils down to growing electronic systems and the number of components."]

They're known as "key-off fires," said Frank Borris, a former NHTSA investigator who now works as a safety consultant. "The engine is off," he said, "but the circuits are still hot and they stay hot all the time." Earlier this year, Kia needed to recall 463,000 Tellurides because of the risk that the front power-seat switch could overheat and ignite the seat. That was the second time Kia had issued a recall for that one defect. The first recall, in 2024, didn't fully address the problem. More than 66,000 Ford Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators from the 2021 model year were recalled due to circuit boards in the battery junction box that could short out. At least 16 fires were blamed on the problem, which often ignited when the vehicles were parked and turned off.


NHTSA has issued 93 "park outside" recalls since 2021, according to a Post analysis. Nearly half — 44 recalls — covered vehicles exclusively with conventional internal-combustion engines, while 38 recalls were just for EVs or hybrids. So the number of campaigns were nearly equally divided between gas and electric or hybrid vehicles. But gas vehicles pull away when comparing the size of the recalls. Gas-only campaigns covered a combined 4.6 million vehicles with "park outside" recalls over the past five years, compared to only about 662,000 vehicles that were EVs or hybrids...


Other countries have provided limited looks at the EV fire issue, such as an United Kingdom government review of data from Norway finding that gas and diesel vehicles had a fire incidence rate that was four times higher than EVs from 2016 to 2021.



Just in 2026, U.S. authorities have announced 17 new "park outside" recalls covering 1.7 million vehicles, according to the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chatbot Conversations Can Become Evidence in Court

The Washington Post looks "a growing number of Americans who have had their private conversations with AI chatbots made public in court," calling the chatbots "custodians of a fast-growing trove of intimate data that can be sought by law enforcement, or companies or other opponents in civil litigation."

A Washington Post review of public records and local news stories found that chatbot logs were cited in 12 court cases over the past two years. It's hard to know how often chatbot material is drawn into investigations and legal proceedings more broadly, because police, and parties in civil cases, don't have to present in court all the evidence they obtain... In some cases, AI companies have reported people on their platforms to the FBI, leading to prosecutions and at least one conviction... OpenAI has said the company uses software to scan conversations for signs of dangerous behavior and flag them to human reviewers.

If a reviewer determines a chat indicates "an imminent and credible risk of harm to others," they report the user to law enforcement, the company said in an April blog post. A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to disclose how many times the company had reported users to police.... Data released by OpenAI shows requests by government agencies and law enforcement for user data growing rapidly. In the second half of 2025, the company disclosed data from more than 80 accounts, an increase of more than four times as many over the same period the year before...

When police ask someone to open their phone during questioning or after an arrest, they often do so, allowing officers to scroll through the apps they use, [according to Michael Price, the litigation director for the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers]... In general, the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures of their property, provides the right to refuse a search of the contents of their phone unless police have a warrant. "The short answer is that most people consent," Price said. "They shouldn't, but they do..."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that conversations with chatbots should receive special legal protections, similar to conversations between clients and their attorneys.

Special legal protections aren't recognized by courts today, the article poitns out. A financial executive who became the subject of a federal criminal investigation for fraud asked Claude about potential defense strategies, then asked a judge to disallow the conversations from the prosecution's case, according to the article. "But the judge said that protections for conversations between clients and their attorneys did not apply: Claude is not a lawyer, and the executive's attorneys did not ask him to talk to the chatbot."

The article includes quotes from three ChatGPT conversations that later turned up in court proceedings:


"I deleted a email a year ago from my yahoo account. Can yahoo still retrieve the email?"

"How f----d am i bro. What if i smahsed the s--- oitta mutlipls cars."
"My dad Said that I'm will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar."
"As AI becomes a bigger part of everyday life, its use as evidence and in trials is likely to become more prevalent," the article points out — especially with the growing popularity of agents that take actions for users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Linux Kernel Is Approaching 2,000 CVEs Per Release

Phoronix reports on Greg Kroah-Hartman's recent slide from his upcoming talk in Paris at Kernel Recipes 2026 (September 21 to 23):



With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3... Fortunately, most often they end up being lower priority vulnerabilities and often within old/obscure driver code, so the impact is often minimal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Found Kodachrome Slide

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Kodachrome Slide

Hello Rabbit

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Hello Rabbit

Los Angeles, 2015

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Los Angeles, 2015

Can't Resist

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Can't Resist

I Can't Feel Anything

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

I Can't Feel Anything

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Palestinian woman and NBC News team reportedly attacked in West Bank

Matt Bradley and crew assaulted while interviewing woman who said settlers had driven family out of home

A Palestinian woman and an NBC News team are reported to have been attacked and injured by masked Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday, amid worsening confrontations in the area.

Benjamin Netanyahu said he condemned the violence committed “by a handful of rioters”.

Continue reading...

Argentina 21-27 Australia: men’s rugby union international – live

Tom Hooper scores decisive try in a messy game as Les Kiss earns biggest scalp of his early tenure.

Gordon gets us underway!

After Australia’s anthem it’s Argentina’s retort.

Continue reading...

Lavish spending fails to fix Tottenham’s big issue – the lack of soul and spine | Jonathan Liew

It might be too early to push the panic button but Roberto De Zerbi faces a huge task if he is to turn Spurs around

Time for Tottenham to start panicking? This is, of course, a subtle trick question. Tottenham is one of those clubs that never actually stops panicking. They panic when they concede and they panic when they score. They panic when they have the ball and they panic when someone else does. They have a coach in Roberto De Zerbi whose face evokes a state of permanent alarm, the expression of a man perpetually having a toilet door opened on him. One year they even managed to panic their way to the Europa League. For the ever-rattled Spurs fan, this club is less a treasured devotion and more a lifelong haunting, broken up by occasional panic substitutions.

You could intuit that sense of encrusted resignation pretty much from the moment Anthony Elanga’s improvised shot kissed the post and trickled over the line to give Newcastle the lead. Since beating Aston Villa 4-1 in late 2024, Tottenham have gone behind 44 times in all competitions and come back to win precisely zero of them. There is something innate and endemic here, a chronic case of Long Tottenham for which – despite the new coach, the new leadership structure and more than a third of a billion pounds in transfer fees – there remains no proven cure. Yoane Wissa’s clincher was of zero surprise to anyone.

Continue reading...

Moses Itauma v Filip Hrgović: IBF heavyweight championship – live

Correction: there’s one more preliminary fight before Noakes v Berinchyk. And it was a quick one. Nelson Hysa, aka the Albanian Eagle, just made quick work of the badly overmatched Thomas Narmo, scoring a brutal technical knockout early in the second round.

The arena looks pretty close to full which is a positive surprise. There was speculation earlier in the week that ticket sales had been a little sluggish and when I arrived just before seven this evening they were still selling seats to people who had just walked up to the 02. This is only Moses Itauma’s 15th fight and, while his face has been plastered across London’s buses the past few weeks, he is still a 21-year-old fighter who is at the start of his ascent to elite-level boxing.

Continue reading...

Nakasu Okabe Building II - Hakata - Fukuoka - Japan

on the water photography has added a photo to the pool:

Nakasu Okabe Building II - Hakata - Fukuoka - Japan

Building Specifications

Structure: 9 stories above ground with 1 basement level (9F/B1), built with steel-framed reinforced concrete (SRC).

Completion Date: September 1990 (built to modern earthquake resistance standards).

Dancer in the Koenji awa odori

artiegillispie has added a photo to the pool:

Dancer in the Koenji awa odori

VK: Voorpagina

Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

Kolonisten vallen Palestijns dorp aan, Israëlisch leger grijpt in, ook Amerikaanse journalisten belaagd

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Zeker drie doden door botsing op dijk Lelystad-Enkhuizen

LELYSTAD (ANP) - Zeker drie mensen zijn zaterdagavond laat om het leven gekomen door een aanrijding tussen twee auto's op de dijk tussen Lelystad en Enkhuizen. De politie meldt dat de Markerwaarddijk (N307) voorlopig dicht is.

In de beide auto's zaten in totaal acht personen. Het lijkt erop dat ze frontaal op elkaar zijn gebotst. Hoe dat kon gebeuren, is nog niet duidelijk.


kottke.org

Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products

Ahhh, relax with the sights and sounds of the Windows 98...

Ahhh, relax with the sights and sounds of the Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator.