Mastodawn

@cwebber the US is not a country of laws, period. What USPTO says doesn't matter.

The EU however, just 3 days ago adopted text. LLM scammers MUST comply with licenses including payment to train on copyrighted work, regardless of location. And purely LLM generated slop *cannot be copyrighted*. There MUST be significant human contribution.

So purely LLM generated slop to try and license wash something is pretty much definitively unlawful now.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20260306IPR37511/protecting-copyrighted-work-and-the-eu-s-creative-sector-in-the-age-of-ai

Protecting copyrighted work and the EU’s creative sector in the age of AI | News | European Parliament

To protect the creative sector in the EU, the use of copyrighted work by artificial intelligence requires transparency and fair remuneration, Parliament says.

thesquarepear Mar 5

Dan Gillmor Mar 5

The U.K. accelerates toward police state status, by requiring the equivalent of a license to read and speak online. Worse, it drastically undermines your personal security.

The US is moving this way, too. Wake up, people, because it's almost too late.

https://action.openrightsgroup.org/no-id-checks-web-access

No ID Checks for Web Access

Take action! What’s the problem? The Government has proposed amendments to the Children Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would give Ministers the power to restrict access to "internet services". This is supposed to give the Government the power to ban under 16s from social media but “internet services" is a very broad definition, which means any online platform can be included. The wording of the amendment means they could do this without even having to prove that these sites are harmful for children.

Open Rights Group

thesquarepear Mar 5

Greenpeace International Mar 5

You know what WON’T get stuck in the Strait of Hormuz?

Solar and wind energy

thesquarepear Mar 1

kim_harding ✅Mar 1

Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/27/palantir-sues-swiss-magazine-for-accurately-reporting-that-the-swiss-government-didnt-want-palantir/

Please note that Palantir would rather that you didn't share this story, it makes them look even more stupid if you do...

Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir

If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged…

Techdirt

thesquarepear Feb 25

CelloMom On Cars Feb 25

"A new method for computing the hazards from extreme events: it can compute all relevant hazard metrics for events such as heat waves, floods and droughts in any region worldwide with unprecedented information content.

Using it for Europe, the researchers found that anthropogenic climate change has caused a tenfold increase in extreme heat in recent decades."

https://www.eureporter.co/environment/climate-change/2026/02/25/new-computation-method-for-climate-extremes-researchers-at-the-university-of-graz-reveal-tenfold-increase-of-heat-over-europe/

New computation method for climate extremes: Researchers at the University of Graz reveal tenfold increase of heat over Europe

How much will heat, flooding, drought and storms increase as a result of human-induced climate change? In a groundbreaking study, climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast and his team at the University of Graz have developed a new method for computing the hazards from extreme events: it can compute all relevant hazard metrics for events such as […]

thesquarepear Jan 28

OpenStreetMap Ops Team Jan 28

To keep #OpenStreetMap.org up and running while we're being deluged by scrapers, we've blocked 320,000+ primarily residential IPv4 addresses in the last 24 hours (+ 100,000 IPv6) involved in scraping.

If you need OSM data, please don't scrape the website - use the official downloads at https://planet.openstreetmap.org
🙏🌍 #AI #Bots #Abuse

Planet OSM

thesquarepear Jan 26

European Commission Jan 26

💚 Today is the International Day of Clean Energy.

- Nearly half of Europe's electricity came from renewables in 2024.

- We saved €120 billion through energy efficiency measures.

- And in June 2025, solar became the EU's largest power source for the first time in history.

Today we reaffirm our commitment to clean energy over imported fossil fuels, and to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.

thesquarepear Jan 20

Zack Labe Jan 20

Don’t forget to join our webinar tomorrow! We will cover global and U.S. climate stats from 2025, plus the latest U.S. billion-dollar disaster data and research. Register at: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-briefings

The Monthly Climate Brief | Climate Central

Insights for informed decisions.

thesquarepear Jan 8

pandoc Jan 8

Pandoc in the browser, with a friendly interface. This app is a web-assembly version of pandoc, the documents never leave your computer:

https://pandoc.org/wasm-demo/convert.html

#pandoc #wasm

Pandoc in the browser

thesquarepear Jan 5

Ketan Joshi Jan 5

As we've been saying for a while: the "backlash" against climate policies has been wildly, absurdly overstated. This new survey shows how UK MPs badly understate support for climate policies

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/05/mps-underestimate-support-green-policies-study