Bytes: Week in Review - AI's fair use case win, at-home camera surveillance tech, and iPhone's 'F1' ad annoys users
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Welcome to our Week in Review episode. This week, Apple irked customers with movie ads popping out of its wallet app. The Mideast conflict reminded us of a lack of security and smart surveillance cameras. And a federal judge handed down a landmark ruling on AI's use of copyrighted works, citing a legal doctrine known as fair use. And that's where we begin with our guest this week, Joanna Stern, senior personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal.

Fair use is this process where we can use content if we don't recreate it in the original form, right? And journalists use it all the time. Journalists use it a lot. I use it a lot in videos, right? I might want to talk about a movie. I don't have rights to that whole movie. So we use a really small snippet of that movie and we show it to you in a video or a commercial or etc., etc.

What the judge in this case said is that Anthropic's use of books, Anthropic to train their models, took lots of books, actual full books, threw it through their large language models during training, and that's what they used to train some of their models amongst lots of other data, right? All the data on the internet, whatever they could get their hands on. And so what the judge ruled here and what Anthropic was clearly arguing in their case is that this was actually fair use because the large language model doesn't spit out the book, the

the end, right? If you go in and say, tell me, you know, give me the whole book, it's not going to do that. But it is pulling information and data on that book to feed you an answer. And so it sort of argues that really, like, this is the same idea as if a human picked up the book, read it, and then was able to tell you what it was about. So depending on who you listen to, this is either a landmark decision or it's a limited decision. So which one is it?

Probably somewhere in between, but I think it is a big deal in this world of AI. We haven't really had one decision yet that has landed firmly on the side of the AI companies. And this, I think, absolutely sets precedent that if you look at how they're training these systems, they're using human content.

In some cases, they are paying for that content. In this case, they didn't pay for those books. But they're also saying, hey, look, our systems are not going to tell you, they're not going to regurgitate the whole book. Our systems, our machines are learning from this content. And I think we're going to hear that and that sort of argument a lot more in these cases that are ongoing with every industry. It's not just publishing, it's music, it's movies, it's all of it.

Yeah, dozens of AI-related copyright cases working through the courts right now, and we'll have to see how all of these sift out. Now, the second story we wanted to get to today is out of the conflict in the Middle East. Now, experts have warned for years that people need to be more mindful of security with all the smart, connected devices all around us, especially cameras, which look inside and outside our homes.

And if you needed a signal of how seriously to take those warnings, look no further than the cybersecurity issues exposed during the war between Israel and Iran. Because what happened was a former cybersecurity official, a high-ranking one in the Israeli government, warned citizens to turn off their cameras.

and changed their passwords at minimum because they said Iran was hacking into citizens' cameras and using it to better, to geolocate better and better target its missiles as it attacks, when it attacked the country. So, Joanna, this tells us a lot about how easily it is to hack these smart devices, especially cameras.

Well, it is, but it also really depends on the makers of those cameras and where they're coming from. I mean, this has long been a concern in consumer electronics about buying, you know, just off-the-shelf Chinese-made web cameras that, you know, look, it's very cheap. You can go buy one of these webcams or companies can go buy these cheap webcams. They can slap some not-so-secure software on that to set it up, and then they can start selling it on Amazon, other places, et cetera.

And so that has always been a big fear whenever I'm guiding people to buy a webcam or any security system for their home. I really do guide them to look for something that's encrypted, that is from a reputable company, and where they know that company that backs that with cloud services. And again, a reputable company and probably one of the big tech companies. Is this an issue of market forces kind of playing against our best interests, right? Because people are looking for cheap versus safe or secure?

Absolutely. I mean, if you look at sort of the scale of consumer electronics, you can get pretty much a lot of this stuff at cost for a low price Chinese manufacturer. You can find it in pretty much any category, right? From smartphones to cameras to thermostats, et cetera. And so what's really become the focus of security of

the big tech companies on this stuff is encryption. That's one big thing you always want to look for. But also they have the backing of giant cloud systems with much more secure privacy and user data protection. We'll be right back.

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Well, let's switch to our third topic and talk about a company that's focused on privacy and protections, at least as its kind of brand, and that's Apple.

The thing is, it really, really wants you to go see its new racing film, F1, starring Brad Pitt. So much so that it sent iPhone users notification ads through the iOS Wallet app, of all things. It offered a $10 discount to go see the movie in theaters. And that didn't sit well with a lot of people. And I'd like you to see some of the complaints we have to show you from social media. Here are a few samples. You see it. Who approved this? Oh, hell no. Hope it's a one-off.

I can tell you that there were a lot of others. These are just a few. Joanna, really pop-up ads? Is this a first for Apple? It's really not a first for Apple. I mean, maybe from like the push notification idea that like, yes, they mass push notification to every one of their users to go watch their movie, which is pretty egregious. But honestly, the settings menu of iPhones has become bizarre.

I would say a billboard for Apple over the last number of years. I mean, you've probably gotten the, you know, how much more money to increase your iCloud storage? Why don't you subscribe to Apple TV Plus? Hey, five more months free of Apple Music. So they're constantly trying to push their services through the settings menu, which is where you would actually pay for those things.

And so this went a little bit further, right? It sent that push notification to the Wallet app. I was actually digging into this and it's really, you can't really disable those. You can disable those notifications, but you want those notifications when you actually need to use the Wallet app, right? Like you want to use it to use your movie tickets or you want to use it to use your plane tickets. And so you wouldn't want to disable those notifications, which I think Apple really owes us a setting that says disable our promotional notifications.

And TechCrunch was reporting that perhaps in iOS 26, perhaps that is coming, that there's going to be a new setting suggesting maybe they're going to be doing more of these and so they're going to give people an option.

I think that would be great. I think it's probably a very simple thing for Apple to do. And I think, you know what? Most people won't turn it off. And so most people will get those notifications. And so, you know, if you follow me, I'll tell you to turn it off and I'll tell you exactly how to turn it off when that time comes. But most people, they don't turn off a lot of stuff. That is true. We end up getting the promotions because sometimes they're useful. Sometimes we want that discount. Sometimes you want to know that you're going to go see F1 in the movie theaters for a $10 discount.

That was Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal. Should you want to watch us talking for some reason, you can find the full video of this episode on our YouTube channel, Marketplace APM. And please subscribe if you haven't already so you can watch us every Friday. Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. Daniel Shin also produces our show. Gary O'Keefe is our engineer. Daisy Palacios is the supervising producer. Nancy Fergali is the executive producer. I'm Novosafo, and that's Marketplace Tech.

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