I had approached filing the end-of-week news with the kind of trepidation that seems to come around on a regular cycle—a cycle that lasts as long as the latest TikTok ban deadline. But sure enough, as I sat down to write, the news came through that will be music to my editor’s ears. No last-minute rush (on this, at least). Sure enough, the deadline for the sale of TikTok’s operations in the United States has been extended by another ninety days and will not come into force this week. The third such extension this year, apparently, this time it really will lead to the closing of a deal to see TikTok in the U.S. into new, non-Chinese ownership. I fully anticipate reporting the same come September.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Focus on AI at UK Publishing Event
Meanwhile, in the U.K., details are emerging about a major industry gathering on July 3. The one-day conference is hosted by Publishers’ Licensing Services, an umbrella or collective management organization that manages the interests of rights holders, including collecting fees from licensing. Unsurprisingly, there will be a big focus on AI.
The event is free, so if you are interested, do sign up. And do come and say hello! There is a program here if the thought of nattering to yours truly is not enticing enough. My eye is firmly taken by the session on the role of shadow libraries—repositories of pirated copies and links, like LibGen—that have played such a high-profile and controversial role in getting copyright work on a massive scale into the hands of tech companies without consent or compensation.
Mastodon Joins the AI Scraping Crackdown
This is particularly interesting as this week has seen a number of social media platforms writing AI bans into their terms and conditions. The latest is Mastodon, whose terms now contain highly legalistic wording prohibiting the scraping of content from its Mastodon.social server. I was more surprised that this follows a similar move by X.
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