Geeks (hereby defined as Linux
users) pass the age test by default?
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/california-lawmakers-unanimously-pass-linux-exemption-from-age-verification-law-software-distributed-under-the-gpl-mit-bsd-and-apache-licenses-are-exempt
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.
