Pamela Samuelson @PamelaSamuelson

The Paramount deal would put CBS and CNN under one roof—the kind of concentrated media power Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s 1971 memo urged corporate America to build around institutions shaping public opinion. CBS executives later joined the Chamber effort to act on it.

This year’s powerful El Niño and the record global heat it’s driving, along with severe droughts, wildfires and shrinking water supplies, could lead to nearly half a million more deaths worldwide by the end of February, according to a new report. nbcnews.com/weather/heat/e…

Welp. According to Semafor, David Ellison has discussed bringing Elon Musk on as an investor in Paramount's merger with Warner Bros., which could mean Musk could have a stake in CBS News and CNN. semafor.com/article/09/23/…

CCIA weighed in on Vermont's proposed Age-Appropriate Design Code rules. Protecting kids online is an important goal, but regulations should provide clear standards, protect #privacy, & remain consistent with the law passed by the Legislature. Learn more about CCIA’s concerns: buff.ly/2hhLGxC

1. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other Democratic AGs had Paramount and the Ellisons over a barrel. They had secured a restraining order against the merger with Paramount and their negotiating position was about to get even stronger. Then, Bonta threw in the towel.

People need to start paying attention to the issue of derived data in AI training. There’s rightfully been a big focus on the pirated / web-scraped data AI companies train on (resulting in well over 100 lawsuits) - and, increasingly, on synthetic data made by ‘tainted’ models. Derived data gets talked about less, but does the same harm to creatives. Derived data is creative content that is rewritten by AI before it is trained on. So instead of training directly on sentences from your book, a company will first use an AI model to rewrite those sentences, then train on the results. It is harder to detect, because the resulting model is less likely to spit out your work verbatim. But it does the same harm: your work is used without permission to build a product that competes with you. This gets easier to do the better AI models get, so it’s happening more and more. And it makes it that much harder for creatives to know when their work is being exploited, and therefore that much less likely they can defend themselves. This is also a huge issue because it may be a way for AI companies to try to get around opt-outs. Perhaps you have put your work on some platform, and you have opted out of the company that runs the platform training on it. But you likely haven’t opted out of them rewriting it and training on that. They will create derived data from it, train on it, and later say they did nothing wrong. The only real solution to this is training data transparency requirements. Governments must introduce laws that force AI companies to reveal their training data. Until that happens, creatives are forever playing catch-up, at best finding out their work has been exploited long after the fact, at worst never finding out and therefore unable to defend against it.

Whether you are for or against the merger of Paramount and WB, you should know this, per legal filings: “The combined entity upon deal closure will be 65% owned by KSA, Qatar and UAE” Is that who you want to tell our stories?

David Zaslav, the CEO and President of Warner Bros., has been completely ignored in all of this. He is as responsible as anyone for Paramount-WB, and WB-Discovery before it. He gets *$550M* for closing this deal. The States could have ordered that down to zero, drawing a line in the sand: No compensation for illegal dealmaking.

Breaking: Paramount has reached a settlement with a group of states that clears the way for its Warner merger. It won’t have to sell cable channels as part of the deal. on.wsj.com/4AEp9WG

Important perspective on the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act from someone trying to build lawful, useful tools, worried that this bill will make that much much harder.

Michael Grinich @grinich

7 days ago

Congress is considering a bill that could make useful AI agents harder to build and use, without making malicious ones easier to stop. The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R. 9915) targets bots that don’t disclose their identity and purpose, and can "burden a website’s technical

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CORRECT!! These "Stealth Bot" bills are wildly impractical and unconstitutional. Read @senatorshoshana's thread and the underlying piece.

Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair 🦥 @senatorshoshana

a week ago

NEW from me: Identity policy is coming for AI agents, and it's bad. A proposal in Congress is so broad that if you ***scrape a website with CODE—if you don't announce who you are and why you're scraping—you'd be in violation of the law*** And that's not all.

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Great story about how the opposition to a settlement of the Paramount Warner's merger case has exploded Kudos @MegJamesLAT and thanks for quoting our Contrarian analysis of the Ellison bluff to leave LA latimes.com/entertainment-…

Trump just locked CNN out of the White House. Now his billionaire allies want to own it. State attorneys general: Don't settle. Hold the line. Block this merger.

The Ellisons are threatening to leave CA unless the AG's cave on their case to block the Paramount-Warner's merger I call BS together with leading antitrust experts @contrariannews 👇 The AG's and the unions should not fall for it contrariannews.org/p/ags-must-not…

my live fuel clock showing Americans now have spent $70 billion more on filling up with gasoline since March 1 (vs same period a yr ago) and $44 billion more on diesel (same dates) for a total of ~$114.2 billion spent over this time.

Since Trump claims that it was “the military” that requested to use the arch to store sniper ammo & drones, these are the times when a Democratic majority could bring Gen. Dan Caine before Congress to find out from him if that is true & why. As usual, Republicans will do nothing.

For those who don’t live around here, here’s how stupid this idea is: the arch is planned for a traffic circle within spitting distance of the PENTAGON. The idea of storing ammunition and drones there, and not the PENTAGON, which is a three minute drive away, is beyond dumb.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

4 days ago

Beyond parody: "At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into

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This new lawsuit from Universal & Sony against Suno is big, because it makes an argument many have made previously outside of court: that training on ‘synthetic data’ should not get you off the hook for copying people’s work for AI training. In the new lawsuit, the labels: - allege Suno v6 was trained on outputs of previous “tainted” models (which themselves were trained on the labels’ music) - say this amounts to “launder[ing]” [the infringement] - expand the list of works they claim have been infringed to over 60,000 (from ~600 in their original lawsuit), which theoretically increases Suno’s maximum potential liability to around $9 billion I suspect we will soon see more lawsuits around AI companies’ use of ‘synthetic data’. Full complaint: musicbusinessworldwide.com/files/2026/09/…

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Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex

2 weeks ago

Suno is moving to models trained on music it has licensed. This is a big win for musicians, and likely wouldn’t have happened without the lawsuits of the last couple of years. But they say the new models were still trained on “Suno user data”. This is worrying. It sounds to me

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Spain just blocked Archive Today. Try to visit the web archive and many Spanish ISPs now redirect you to a government page warning: “YOU ARE TRYING TO ACCESS AN ILLEGAL WEBSITE.” It even tells users they’re “contributing to an illegal and criminal activity” simply by trying to access it. A tool used by journalists and researchers to preserve the web is now treated like contraband. The block reportedly followed a complaint from an unnamed rights holder and was imposed by Spain’s Intellectual Property Commission, not through a court ruling. That's an entire web-archiving service blocked over copyright and the complainant isn’t even public.

Reclaim The Net @ReclaimTheNetHQ

5 days ago

Spain Orders Blocks On Archive Today And Its Mirrors reclaimthenet.org/spain-blocks-a…

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🚨مطار الرياض بعد الضربات الحيدرية للقوات اليمنية🤯🔥