United Kingdom

Last Friday at Woolwich crown court, Mr Justice Johnson sentenced four Palestine Action activists to a total of nearly 27 years (Nelson Mandela’s term in prison) for their role in an action on the Bristol-based research centre of an Israeli weapons factory. At the same time, our history was rewritten. The suffragettes, the chartists, the women of Greenham Common, and many more besides: all terrorists.

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Some 31 UK websites, backed by the Movement for an Open Web (MOW), have added new “Search-Only Contracts” (SOC) to their website terms and conditions which prohibit the copying and repurposing of content by LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

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The terms seek to beef up existing robots.txt notices on websites, which are currently widely ignored by generative AI companies.

The contracts set out payment rates, typically £500 per article, for unauthorised website scraping which pave the way for future legal claims. In simple terms, they state that website users enter into a contract when they access a web page and agree not to copy and reuse content without permission.

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According to MOW the new system makes it easy for publishers to lodge small legal claims over unwanted scraping. All they need is proof that a particular LLM has taken their work, which is straightforward to establish via targeted questioning of the chatbot in question. The next stage is to issue the owner of the LLM with an invoice and then enforce payment at a local county court if the bill is not paid.

Claims can be started via the website Moneyclaim.gov.uk (at a cost of around £50) and are then decided at a local county (or small claims) court where it is normal for claimants to represent themselves.

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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1196216/uk-introduces-full-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-including-snapchat-tiktok-youtube-inst

Keir Starmer is to ban under-16s from major social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram and X in sweeping restrictions described as “Australia plus”, the Guardian understands.

In a major policy shift far tougher than previously briefed, the prime minister will announce that teenagers will be banned from all the main social platforms. Online products that are not covered by the ban – such as gaming apps – will face new restrictions such as having the option to chat to strangers removed.

Tommy Robinson was detained by police on Saturday at Heathrow airport under counter-terrorism laws, after a week in which he rose to further prominence on social media.

It was understood the far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was stopped and had his phones seized under section 3 of the Counter-Terrorism Border Security Act 2019.

Robinson used social media to claim he was detained for almost three hours and had his iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phones taken, and to ask his supporters to donate money to fund his legal defence.