On May 5, five of the world's largest publishing houses, Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, joined author Scott Turow in filing a class action against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges Meta torrented over 267 terabytes of pirated material, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of publications, to train its Llama large language models, and that Zuckerberg personally authorized abandoning licensing negotiations in favor of using pirated datasets. This is a case worth watching carefully, for reasons ...
On May 11, 2026, the Office of the Texas Attorney General (AG) filed a 59-page petition in Collin County District Court against Netflix, Inc., alleging that the company spent years assuring consumers it was an ad-free, privacy-respecting alternative to Big Tech while quietly constructing one of the most sophisticated behavioral surveillance systems in the world. Netflix’s CEO told investors in 2019 they could “be confident” the company would never move into advertising. By 2022, Netflix had launched an ad-supported tier powered by the very data it swore it wasn’t ...