Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Thursday, June 26, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

The legal rulings on AI are finally coming in. The problem is they're contradictory, so we're not getting any legal clarity yet.

Creative Commons, but for AI training data, is DeepSeaks R2 model being stymied by lack of access to

Nvidia chips, and another deep look at the question of is AI taking jobs at tech companies

right now?

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

A group of authors is suing Microsoft in a New York federal court, claiming the company used

nearly 200,000 pirated books without permission to train its Megatron AI model, quoting Reuters.

Kaya Bird, Gia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent, and several others allege that Microsoft used

pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit filed in New York federal court on Tuesday is one of

several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets, and other copyright holders against

tech companies, including meta-platforms, Anthropic, and Microsoft-backed Open AI over alleged

misuse of their material in AI training. The complaint against Microsoft came a day after

a California federal judge ruled that Anthropic made fair use under U.S. copyright law of

author's material to train its AI systems but may still be liable for pirating their books.

It was the first U.S. decision on the legality of using copyrighted materials without

permission for generative AI training. The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a

collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an algorithm that gives text

responses to user prompts. The complaint said Microsoft used the pirated data set to create a,

quote, computer model that is not only built on the work of thousands of creators and authors, but also built to generate a wide range of expression that mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained, end quote.

Tech companies have argued that they make fair use of copyrighted material to create new transformative content,

and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning

...