The first of today’s round-up of interesting stories combines two threads that have been simmering away for a couple of months: Substack’s growth and the battle between Apple and Epic Games.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
You will recall that Epic Games won a victory in their challenge to Apple’s taking a slice (27 percent) of in-app payments from apps downloaded from the app store. That victory meant app creators could now direct people in-app to their own payment sites and menus without having to pay Apple anything. Spotify was one of the first to take advantage of this, alongside Kindle. And now Substack has joined in.
From what I understand, US-based creators who use Substack will now be able to offer new subscribers a choice of using Apple’s in-app payment system or, for a lower price, going to Substack’s own payment platform.
OpenAI Faces Legal Action in India
Meanwhile, an interesting development in the legal battles between creatives and tech companies—with thanks to Mark Williams for the pointer. The Anthropic class action in the US has taken over from the suit against Meta as the dominant news item in recent weeks. But now it’s the turn of OpenAI to face a battle in the courts. This time the legal action is happening in India, which is a timely reminder that this is a global issue.
The argument is being brought for Indian news publishers by the Digital News Publishers Association. They argue against the scraping of news content by AI models, saying such activity “reduces the incentive to create.” The response from OpenAI is that what happens when AI is trained on news items is the creation of legitimate new, derivative content.
Human vs. Machine Use of Sources
As Williams explains, this is an interesting case because it seeks to establish that something very different happens when humans use existing sources compared to what happens when machines do. (You’ll remember a similar kind of argument was commented on by judges in both the Meta and Anthropic cases, with one judge ruling that AI essentially did what humans do and another ruling that the scale of AI’s activity made it qualitatively different from humans.)
I was relieved, as a reporter who enjoys his pieces, to read Williams’ enthusiastic endorsement of the idea that basing a second report on the same facts as a first does not constitute copyright violation!
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