Michael Weinberg

People in the water surrounding a fishing boat, Lee is on the boat drawing what they describe.

An overhead shot of the fishing boat and snorkelers, taking from a drone.

Someone inside the diving bell, the photo is taken underwater.

Lee on land drawing fish people describe.

🐠🐡I wrote about my experiences exploring the reef as a visually impaired person and making a descriptive diving bell at Dinacon! Check it out! medium.com/@leeborg_/a-...

Justin Timberlake Reveals Lyme Disease Diagnosis "Living with this can be relentlessly debilitating, both mentally and physically,” the singer said on social media.

I'm glad that a public figure is speaking out about Lyme Disease! 2 years ago, Lyme forever changed my life. I'm thankfully on the other side of the worst of it, but it continues to impact me. He's right: Lyme is relentless, debilitating, and too common.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-n...

RS000001

While I am celebrating the first @oshwassociation.bsky.social certified open hardware from Serbia (certification.oshwa.org/rs000001.html), I will admit that my favorite thing this month is the slime mold powered smart watch certification.oshwa.org/us002764.html

Restating Copyright: The ALI’s Landmark Project and What It Means for the Law In May 2025, the membership of the American Law Institute (ALI) completed a milestone in our understanding and interpretation of U.S. copyright law: the approval of its first-ever Restatement of the L...

Deep Copyright Nerd Alert: The Reporter team for ALI's recently-approved Restatement of Copyright talks about the project and its significance on the Kluwer Copyright Blog. legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-bl...

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Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training.

This new lawsuit alleges that Meta was intentionally seeding porn videos on bittorrent in order to accelerate its own download speeds for the books it was downloading to build an AI training corpus (¶¶ 111-121), partially to balace their non-seeing of the books arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

I keep seeing this and other news stories about lenacapavir going viral, so, respectfully...
The approval of lenacapavir PrEP, standing alone, absolutely will NOT bring the HIV epidemic to an end. We have highly effective HIV preventive meds for over a decade now, and yet the epidemic continues.

The 2025 Public Song Project | WNYC | New York Public Radio, Podcasts, Live Streaming Radio, News The Public Song Project invites anyone to record their own musical adaptation of a work in the public domain.

HUGE congratulations to all of the winners of this year's @wnyc.org Public Song Project (w/ judging from EC'ers @littlewow.online & @michaelweinberg.org)

www.wnyc.org/story/2025-p...

mothbox's Profile The Open Source Insect Monitor you can make yourself! https://digital-naturalism-laboratories.github.io/Mothbox/ See some of the data from our expeditions around the world! Help us ID some of thes...

It's #mothweek! And we just got the @mothbox.bsky.social to be able to automatically tag photos with IDs to send to @inaturalist.bsky.social !

Follow our new inaturalist account if you want to help refine ids on cool stuff we see!
inaturalist.ala.org.au/people/mothbox

What ICE Agents Talk About When They Think Nobody Is Listening Cat videos, “The Good Place,” and free Slurpies: these are the topics of conversation among federal agents between arrests in immigration court.

The museum of the banality of evil has many rooms and exhibits and its latest acquisition is a stunner: this piece by Liv Veazey which opens on her eavesdropping on some ICE agents in a cafe before following them to their job snatching people at NYC immigration court. hellgatenyc.com/what-ice-age...

FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices Analysis of broadband affordability deemed “extraneous” by FCC chair.

This is an almost comically on the nose example of how a regulator captured by the industry it regulates would act

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Libraries Pay More for E-Books. Some States Want to Change That.

The NYT covers some of the problems with library ebook pricing. What they fail to mention is that authors are not seeing profit from library ebook licensing--as LF ED @littlewow.online notes, those go to the publisher and the platform. /1

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/b...

Libraries Pay More for E-Books. Some States Want to Change That.

Couldn't be more excited that my "little non-profit that could," the #eBook Study Group, is in NYT this morning in an article on #library eBook licensing! [R U in the other 44 states & interested in library eBook reform w/ proven strategic legal methods? Contact us!] www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/b...

My initial take on rulings on whether using in-copyright works as training data to build generative AI models. The judges agreed that training may be fair use, but differed about uses of pirated data and the risks that copyright markets will be diluted by AI outputs: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

If you're interested in the topic of genetic disclosures & patentability, I recommend this article by Professor Aman Gebru:

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Tackling The AI Bots That Threaten To Overwhelm The Open Web It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published that the issue of using copyright mat…

thanks to @glynmoody.bsky.social for taking a deeper dive into the relationship between AI scraper bots and the open web www.techdirt.com/2025/07/14/t...

This RT is a strong endorsement

yes!

I continue to believe that AI training data "licensing deals" (or other payment schemes) are a recipe for a very small number of well resourced players to extract payments from AI companies while the vast majority of the contributions to the model get nothing. That is a Bad Outcome.

Are AI Bots Crashing Cultural Heritage? 💻 Michael Weinberg Podcast Episode · The Tattooed Historian Show · 07/09/2025 · 32m

Thanks to @tattooedhistorian.bsky.social for having me on to talk about the GLAM-E Lab report on AI bots taking down online cultural heritage collections!

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...

Exciting job
Doing impactful work
With a fantastic team

What more could you want?

my weirdest underdeveloped take is that tech history forked permanently and irreversibly due to DMCA 1201 by subjugating all mass retail electronics to the preferences of the industrial scale corporate content producers.

Oh yeah I blame the king for that one

The Queen loves the public domain. The Queen's evil advisors are to blame!

Library Futures Receives $2.5 Million Arcadia Foundation Grant Research and advocacy for the future of libraries.

Read more on our new contract negotiation plans, made possible by a generous grant from the Arcadia Foundation!

www.libraryfutures.net/post/library...

Stylized logo mounted in a team car so that it is pointing right when the exit is to the left

This tram logo probably feels slightly less snazzy when the arrow is perpetually pointing away from the side one exits the car

At least every week we have a consultation with a small business owner eager to enforce a soon-to-be-issued design patent only to learn that literally none of the competing products in the market even come close to infringing on the patented design. I shouldn't be the one explaining this!

A little bit of both. As you might imagine, once the printer is there all sorts of things suddenly feel urgent to print

Ha, yeah, one or two