Nvidia’s Heist Episode

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Hey Nvidia? You Can't Do That

Nvidia is facing a lawsuit which spiraled out of a 404 Media report which showed that Nvidia knowingly scraped copyrighted material on YouTube (and Netflix and Vimeo) to train their video generating AI model.

404 Media reviewed internal emails, documents, and messages finding that Nvidia had directed employees to scrape the data using Amazon cloud servers to hide their IP addresses in an attempt to avoid detection, as well as screen recording copyrighted media from sites like Netflix.

When employees raised concern about the ethics around this project, they were told that it was an "executive decision" to do this.

What does Nvidia have to say about this? Well first they come out swinging saying they “respect creators.” They continue:

“Anyone is free to learn facts and ideas from publicly available sources. Creating new and transformative works is not only fair and just, but exactly what our legal system encourages.”
~ Nvidia Spokesperson, via 404 Media

I wanna be super clear about this: that is not how this works. This isn't some cute little robot that found YouTube and thought to itself, "well gosh! This seems like a useful repository of information!" - This is a fortune 500 company directing its employees to specifically thwart detection to obtain gargantuan quantities of stolen material in order to train a computer model which they then sell as a product with no compensation to the creators of the source material.

This would be like a restaurant stating they “respect farmers” but it’s their right “to freely use the fruit from farms” after being caught sending their employees to the farm to act as farmhands before stealing billions of dollars of fruit.

A tenuous metaphor to be sure, but it served its purpose.

This is not the only lawsuit of its kind right now. In fact, the same guy suing Nvidia is also suing OpenAI for the same shit. Also of note, they aren't suing for damages necessarily, but instead suing the companies for illegal enrichment.

Once more for good measure: this is theft. Every video published to YouTube has a license. Some of those licenses explicitly allow for use in any way. Most of them do not, and breaking the license is unlawful.

A common person would be facing life in prison or unimaginable fines for that level of theft. Fortune 500 companies are invited to congress to shape legislation about their product which is built on stolen art and data.

Your honor, you must understand, I made an "executive decision." I cannot be held responsible.

Gaza Remains Under Siege By Israel and the United States

The United States and Israel continue to brutally demolish Gaza and slaughter its people indiscriminately, nearly a year on from the attack by Hamas.

The Associated Press published a simple article with a rundown of the statistics from the genocide. In summation: official death tolls in Gaza passed 40,000 souls, about a quarter of which were children.

At least 2% of Gaza's population has been slaughtered by Israeli forces and strikes empowered by the United States in the face of the rest of the world calling for a ceasefire. To bring this home a bit to my country: that would be as though a hostile power has killed 7,000,000 American citizens through bombings of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and more.

Ongoing murmurings about a ceasefire discussion continue, with negotiators claiming again that we're nearing an agreement. I want to remain hopeful, but this would not be the first near-agreement that fell through. Meanwhile, Israel continues to airstrike Gaza.

If you have the means to give back, consider donating to the Alkhazendar family.

Google Requires Your Love

Google is sowwy after publishing a set of rules for their "Team Pixel" influencer program which implied that members of the creator partnership would need to show off their Pixel phone and never state they prefer anything else.

The program is meant to be a marketing ploy rather than a review program, but the wording and format didn't quite land as they had hoped. To participate in the program, you had to agree to the following prompt:

This sent some shock and alarm bells around the content-o-sphere when it came out, as reviewers were concerned it may affect them. Google has since stated that this is only for their "Team Pixel" program, which gives Pixel phones to creators in exchange for content. Still, those creators cannot feature other devices, or they'll get the boot.

After the fallout, a Google comms person stated they "missed the mark with this new language," which is a phrase I am so, so very tired of having to read when companies do Obviously Dumb Shit.

Look, just pay me some dollars and I'll tell you if something is Obviously Dumb. You'll be way better off, trust me.

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Here's the Weather

More Stuff

Twitter has closed their offices in Brazil after a Brazillian supreme court judge took aim at the company. Brazil had previously asked Twitter to remove accounts spreading lies in support of their former far-right leader Bolsonaro.

Mars and Jupiter are holding hands this week and its very, very cute. Specifically, they're positioned just right so that they look as though they're next to each other in the sky, which is pretty dope, and pretty rare.

There's a lot of ongoing wackiness in the world of chess. In addition to the recent poisoning attempt, another player (Andrejs Strebkovs) has been outed for sending explicit messages and pictures to women and children.

The voice actor for Misty from the Pokemon anime has passed away at 55 from breast cancer. All of my homies hate cancer.

Finally for today, After a twelve year battle, Kim Dotcom is to be extradited to the US from New Zealand to face copyright charges. Kim Dotcom (yes, he changed his last name to Dotcom) is the founder of the infamous "MegaUpload" website. He also once put out a music video about it with a WILD cast of cameos.