Like its Big Tech brethren, Microsoft is often attacked for training AI on published materials without paying the copyright owners. They’re considering a marketplace that would deflect the issue by compensating publishers when their materials are used. But don’t get too excited: so far the “Publisher Content Marketplace” is only a planned pilot program with no firm start date.
Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit charging it tricked customers into signing up for Amazon Prime and then made it difficult for them to quit. A jury trial in the suit had already begun. We can only assume that Amazon didn’t like its chances.
OpenAI has built its business on content it hasn’t paid for. But they’re apparently very interested in being paid for the content they generate, in the form of advertising. They are reported to be working on their own in-house ad infrastructure, presumably to avoid reliance on competitors like Google.
Brand safety and media measurement platform Integral Ad Science is being bought by private equity investor Novacap for $1.9 billion. It’s not the first PE rodeo for IAS, which was purchased by Vista Equity Partners in 2018 and went public in 2021. The company reported $530 million revenue in 2024 and is up 16% year-on-year in its latest quarterly report.