In more legal excitement, a federal judge has placed a temporary injunction, pending an appellate hearing, on the implementation of California’s Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. A preliminary injunction issued on December 31 had blocked only some parts of the Act. The injunction will dissolve on February 1 unless the Appeals court intervenes.
The right-wing crusade to gut U.S. regulatory agencies continues to bear fruit. Citing a Supreme Court ruling that allows federal judges to substitute their own judgement for that of federal regulators, an appeals court has ruled that the FCC lacked authority to restore net neutrality rules last year. The rules were aimed at preventing broadband suppliers from selectively favoring some traffic.
Finally: a U.S. district judge has approved an agreement between music publishers and Amazon-backed Anthropic, that Anthropic will try to prevent its Claude AI technology from copying or closely reproducing copyrighted song lyrics. The stipulation was welcomed by the publishers but the lawsuit is ongoing. Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO allege copyright infringement, saying Claude AI has been trained on lyrics from at least 500 copyrighted songs.
Changes in marketing channels and data access have made advertising measurement more important, and challenging, than ever. Taking advantage of growing interest in the topic, Bain Capital is selling Kantar Group’s audience measurement division, Kantar Media, to global investment firm H.I.G. Capital for “approximately $1 billion”. Kantar Media accounts for 4,500 of Kantar Group’s 25,000 employees.