Geeks (hereby defined as Linux users) pass the age test by default?
California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt
California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day. The amendment ends almost a year of uncertainty surrounding whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. AB 1856 has now been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.
These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.
I love interesting questions.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7345958
Prompts as Papers: AI Conversations, Reverse Prompt Warrants, and the Fourth Amendment After Chatrie
In Chatrie v. United States, decided in June 2026, the Supreme Court held that the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search when it acquires a user’s cell-phone Location History from Google, however brief the window and however “voluntary” the opt-in. The decision arrived just months after federal agents obtained the first known search warrant compelling OpenAI to identify a ChatGPT user from the prompts he typed, the debut of what commentators have already named the “reverse prompt warrant.” This Article asks the question those two events put on a collision course: does Chatrie protect what Americans say to artificial intelligence?
The Article makes three contributions. First, it shows that every factor the Chatrie Court relied on (the revealing character of the records, their retrospective and panoptic availability, their diary-like intimacy, and the Court’s emphatic rejection of app-by-app “voluntariness”) applies with greater force to stored human–AI conversations than to location data. On that logic, the extension looks easy.
Second, the Article identifies why it is not. Neither Carpenter nor Chatrie had occasion to confront the branch of the third-party doctrine that governs conversations: the misplaced-confidence rule of Hoffa and White, under which the other party to a dialogue may freely reveal it. A chatbot provider is not a courier of the user’s words to someone else; its own model is the someone else. The government’s strongest argument, one it has not yet made, is that talking to ChatGPT is talking to Open-AI, and that a speaker assumes the risk that his interlocutor will betray him. The first courts to face the question have already divided in result: within a single week, one treated a defendant’s chatbot sessions as disclosure to a third party, while another protected a pro se litigant’s as her own work product because generative models are “tools, not persons”.
Third, the Article resolves what it calls the interlocutor problem: courts should classify the human–AI exchange as the user’s paper, a document drafted with a tool, rather than a communication with an-other party, a characterization supported by the text of the Fourth Amendment, by Justice Gorsuch’s property-based concurrence in Chatrie, by providers’ own contracts assigning output ownership to users, and by the positive law of more than half the states treating data as personal property. On that foundation, the Article builds warrant mechanics for reverse prompt warrants, step-wise particularity and probable-cause requirements of the kind Chatrie remanded and Justice Jackson’s concurrence sketched, and proposes a statutory overlay to close the gap the Stored Communications Act leaves for machine dialogue.
I learn something new, I think…
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7329778
Ambient Copyright Fixation
Copyright protects works recorded “by or under the authority of the author.” For the first fifty years of the 1976 Copyright Act, authority came from deliberate actions: authors directed newer and better machines to be their scribes. Whether it was pen to paper or wake word to Alexa, authors provided intentional direction to machines to record, or “fix” in copyright parlance, their ideas.
Ambient recording devices break that fixation model. When an author gives a public speech, it is now captured by smart glasses, AI recording devices, and always-on cameras operated by others. Device operators upload and exploit the work, not authors. Current doctrine rewards the operator: if an author did not intend to fix the work, it is not under their authority. The minimally creative operator gains protection for having an ambient device in the right place at the right time. And if the device operator is insufficiently creative, they still win: neither side has a copyrightable interest, but only the operator has the copy to exploit. They will upload the work and reap the profits from a brilliant public performance of another. This cannot be justified under any normative theory of copyright. Ambient devices create a constant authorship-fixation gap.
This Article maps that authorship-fixation gap and proposes a new model for closing it: notice and adoption. Drawing from doctrines in cases, foreign jurisdictions, and digital platform infrastructure already operating at scale, the model requires those who would exploit ambiently fixed works to make efforts to notify the author. The author may then choose to adopt the fixation and claim copyright protection while potentially sharing rewards with the device operator. This is a natural extension of existing platform management of unauthorized works. In a world where ambient fixation is everywhere, copyright should stop rewarding whoever happens to operate devices and start rewarding those who create.
