Alphabet's Google violated a software developer's patent rights with its remote-streaming technology and must pay $338.7 million in damages, a federal jury in Waco, Texas decided on Friday. From a report: The jury found that Google's Chromecast and other devices infringe patents owned by Touchstream Technologies related to streaming videos from one screen to another. Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said on Monday that the company will appeal the verdict and has "always developed technology independently and competed on the merits of our ideas." Touchstream attorney Ryan Dykal said on Monday that Touchstream was pleased with the verdict. New York-based Touchstream, which also does business as Shodogg, said in its 2021 lawsuit that founder David Strober invented technology in 2010 to "move" videos from a small device like a smartphone to a larger device like a television.

The New York Times points out that so-called "shadow libraries," like Library Genesis, Z-Library or Bibliotik, "are obscure repositories storing millions of titles, in many cases without permission — and are often used as A.I. training data." A.I. companies have acknowledged in research papers that they rely on shadow libraries. OpenAI's GPT-1 was trained on BookCorpus, which has over 7,000 unpublished titles scraped from the self-publishing platform Smashwords. To train GPT-3, OpenAI said that about 16 percent of the data it used came from two "internet-based books corpora" that it called "Books1" and "Books2." According to a lawsuit by the comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors against OpenAI, Books2 is most likely a "flagrantly illegal" shadow library.

These sites have been under scrutiny for some time. The Authors Guild, which organized the authors' open letter to tech executives, cited studies in 2016 and 2017 that suggested text piracy depressed legitimate book sales by as much as 14 percent.

Efforts to shut down these sites have floundered. Last year, the F.B.I., with help from the Authors Guild, charged two people accused of running Z-Library with copyright infringement, fraud and money laundering. But afterward, some of these sites were moved to the dark web and torrent sites, making it harder to trace them. And because many of these sites are run outside the United States and anonymously, actually punishing the operators is a tall task.

Tech companies are becoming more tight-lipped about the data used to train their systems.

Tuesday North America's largest lithium mining operation cleared its last legal hurdle in federal appeals court, giving a green light to the mining of 6,000 acres in an 18,000-acre project site near Nevada's northern border.

But meanwhile, in Southern Nevada... Federal land managers have formally withdrawn their authorization of a Canadian mining company's lithium exploration project bordering a national wildlife refuge in southern Nevada after conservationists sought a court order to block it.

The Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy said in a lawsuit filed July 7 that the project on the edge of the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge outside Las Vegas posed an illegal risk to a dozen fish, snail and plant species currently protected under the Endangered Species Act. They filed an additional motion this week in federal court seeking a temporary injunction prohibiting Rover Metals from initiating the drilling of 30 bore sites in search of the highly sought-after metal used to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles.

But before a judge in Las Vegas could rule on the request, the Bureau of Land Management notified Rover Metals on Wednesday that its earlier acceptance of the company's notice of its intent to proceed "was in error... The agency has concluded that proposed operations are likely to result in disturbance to localized groundwaters that supply the connected surface waters associated with Threatened and Endangered species in local springs," said Angelita Bulletts, district manager of the bureau's southern Nevada district...

Conservationists said the reversal provides at least a temporary reprieve for the lush oasis in the Mojave Desert that is home to 25 species of fish, plants, insects and snails that are found nowhere else on Earth — one of the highest concentrations of endemic species in North America at one of the hottest, driest places on the planet.
The article ends with this quote from a director at the Center for Biological Diversity and the Amargosa Conservancy. "We need lithium for our renewable energy transition, but this episode sends a message loud and clear that some places are just too special to drill."