Open Weights, Closed Markets

MiniMax released open weights for H3 on August 3 — a 33B video generation model that produces native stereo audio in the same forward pass as video and currently tops open-weight video rankings. The catch is a geographic restriction that effectively prohibits use in the US, EU, UK, and South Korea, the result of active copyright litigation from Hollywood studios and regulatory uncertainty in Western markets.

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GCC Will Not Take Your AI Code

The GCC steering committee adopted a policy declining "legally significant" LLM-generated contributions, with a carve-out for test cases. The motivation is copyright clarity for GPL enforcement, not code quality — a distinction that matters more than it might seem, and that every major open-source project will eventually have to address.

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Copilot Signs the Commit Whether You Asked It To or Not

VS Code 1.118, released April 29, silently turned on automatic Copilot co-authorship for git commits by changing git.addAICoAuthor from "off" to "all" by default. The feature has bugs — it fires even when AI features are disabled — and has already stamped 4M+ GitHub commits with a non-human co-author, surfacing awkward questions about copyright ownership that the US Copyright Office has already answered.

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Finetuning Unlocks the Books That Were Always There

A paper from Columbia and UW shows that finetuning frontier models on plot-summary expansions — no actual book text in training — triggers verbatim recall of 85–90% of held-out copyrighted novels. The result generalizes across authors and across providers, and directly challenges the argument that safety alignment serves as adequate copyright protection.

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What You Get When You Only Train on Public Domain Text

Mr. Chatterbox is a 340M-parameter model trained exclusively on 28,000 Victorian-era texts from the British Library — definitively public domain, zero copyright exposure. Simon Willison's writeup documents both what it proves and what it falls short of: the corpus is large enough to train something coherent, but not large enough to be useful by Chinchilla norms.

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