Month: February 2024

Some of the best mobile technology companies will converge at the Fira de Barcelona next week for MWC 2024. Here’s what to expect.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder, which was just released for the Nintendo Switch a few months ago, is already available from Amazon for a discounted price of $52.

Check out these three movies on Hulu that are perfect to watch this winter, including an uncomfortable satire and a terrific coming-of-age film from Zach Braff.

An appeals court has blocked a $1 billion copyright verdict from 2019 against US internet service provider Cox Communications and ordered a retrial, Arts Technica has reported. A three-judge panel ruled unanimously that Cox didn’t profit directly from its users’ piracy, rebutting claims from Sony, Universal and Warner. 

The judges did affirm the original jury’s finding of willful contributory infringement from the trial, first announced back in 2018. To that effect, they ordered a new damages trial that may reduce the size of the award.

“We reverse the vicarious liability verdict and remand for a new trial on damages because Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement, a legal prerequisite for vicarious liability,” the panel wrote. It added that “no reasonable jury could find that Cox received a direct financial benefit from its subscribers’ infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights.” 

Cox allegedly refused to take “reasonable measures” to fight piracy, according to the original allegations. Internet providers are supposed to terminate the accounts of offending users, but the ISP only conducted temporary disconnections and warned some users more than 100 times. The labels claimed it even instituted a cap on accepted copyright complaints and cut back on anti-piracy staffers.

However, the judges said that Sony offered no causal connection between infringement and higher revenues for Cox. “No evidence suggest that customers chose Cox’s Internet service, as opposed to a competitor’s, because of any knowledge or expectation about Cox’s lenient response to infringement.” 

Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and EU rules, ISPs enjoy “safe harbor” protections that shield them from liability for user actions. However, that only holds if they comply with specific requirements and address copyright violations promptly — and in this case, Cox didn’t do that, the judges said. 

“The jury saw evidence that Cox knew of specific instances of repeat copyright infringement occurring on its network, that Cox traced those instances to specific users, and that Cox chose to continue providing monthly Internet access to those users… because it wanted to avoid losing revenue,” the ruling states. The case is now headed back to a US District court.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/appeals-court-overturns-1-billion-copyright-lawsuit-against-cox-130810427.html?src=rss

Google has released an open AI model called Gemma, which it says is created using the same research and technology that was used to build its Gemini AI models. The company says Gemma is its contribution to the open community and is meant to help developers “in building AI responsibly.” As such, it also introduced the Responsible Generative AI Toolkit alongside Gemma. It contains a debugging tool, as well as a guide with best practices for AI development based on Google’s experience.

The company has made Gemma available in two different sizes — Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B — which both come with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants and are both lightweight enough to run directly on a developer’s laptop or desktop computer. Google says Gemma surpasses much larger models when it comes to key benchmarks and that both model sizes outperform other open models out there. 

In addition to being powerful, the Gemma models were trained to be safe. Google used automated techniques to strip personal information from the data it used to train the models, and it used reinforcement learning based on human feedback to ensure Gemma’s instruction-tuned variants show responsible behaviors. Companies and independent developers could use Gemma to create AI-powered applications, especially if none of the currently available open models are powerful enough for what they want to build. 

Google has plans to introduce even more Gemma variants in the future for an even more diverse range of applications. That said, those who want to start working with the models right now can access them through data science platform Kaggle, the company’s Colab notebooks or through Google Cloud. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-introduces-a-lightweight-open-ai-model-called-gemma-130053289.html?src=rss

Copilot gets new powers in Windows 11, including accessibility features, tapping battery info, and taking out the trash.

Sand Land’s video game adaptation has received a lengthy new trailer showcasing loads of in-game footage.