TikTok divestment bill, Nvidia sued by authors over AI, legal jobs return to near-record high, and judge blocks NLRB rule ⬇️
Reuters Legal
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☀️ Good morning from The Legal File! Here is the rundown of today's top legal stories:
📱 TikTok divestment bill would give government stronger legal position, DOJ says
The U.S. government would be in a stronger legal position if lawmakers ordered China's ByteDance to divest TikTok, rather than simply banning the app used by 170 million Americans, the Justice Department told the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a document on March 7 before the panel voted 50-0 on the divestment bill. Read about the bill.
Lawmakers and the Biden administration say TikTok poses enormous national security risks because the Chinese government could gain access to data from millions of American users.
"An orderly divestment of TikTok from (China) would give Americans secure ownership of their data, including posts, photos and videos while minimizing the disruption to the over 100 million TikTok accounts in the United States," the document said.
TikTok, which says it has not and would not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government, said on Thursday the "legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States."
🖋️ Nvidia is sued by authors over AI use of copyrighted works
Nvidia, whose chips power AI, has been sued by authors Brian Keene, and Stewart O'Nan ,who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform. Read about the lawsuit.
The authors said their works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language, before being taken down in October "due to reported copyright infringement."
In a proposed class action filed, the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia's having "admitted" it trained NeMo on the dataset, and thereby infringed their copyrights.
Among the works covered by the lawsuit are Keene's 2008 novel "Ghost Walk," Nazemian's 2019 novel "Like a Love Story," and O'Nan's 2007 novella "Last Night at the Lobster."
More on Artists v. AI:
Authors suing OpenAI lose bid to halt rival N.Y. copyright lawsuits
Music publishers fire back at Anthropic in AI copyright lawsuit
Artists take new shot at Stability, Midjourney in updated copyright lawsuit
🏢 US legal jobs returned to near-record high in February, Labor Dept says
The U.S. legal services sector added 2,700 jobs in February, resuming an upward trajectory after dipping at the start of the year, according to new U.S. Labor Department data.
Legal sector employment totaled 1,192,600 jobs last month, according to preliminary seasonally adjusted data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's just 900 jobs shy of the record total of 1,193,500 jobs reported for December.
U.S. job growth in the broader economy accelerated last month, but downward revisions to employment gains in the prior two months and an increase in the unemployment rate to a two-year high of 3.9% suggested that the labor market was slowing.
⚖️ Judge blocks US labor board rule on contract and franchise workers
U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker in Texas struck down a NLRB rule that would treat many companies as employers of certain contract and franchise workers and require them to bargain with unions representing them.
Barker agreed with the challengers to the "joint employers" rule, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that the rule is too broad and violates federal labor law. The rule, issued in October, had been set to take effect on March 11.
Barker said the rule is invalid because it would treat some companies as the employers of contract or franchise workers even when they lacked any meaningful control over their working conditions.
“The District Court’s decision to vacate the Board’s rule is a disappointing setback, but is not the last word on our efforts to return our joint-employer standard to the common law principles that have been endorsed by other courts," NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran said in a statement.
👋 That's all for today, thank you for reading The Legal File, and have a great day!
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1yThe reason why they're doing this is because they can't control the narrative in a lot of people posting the truth on there and they don't want the truth getting out that's the whole purpose of it Facebook and Instagram's 10 times worse than Tiktok I see more scams and I get hacked more time on Facebook and Instagram and I ever do on any other platform
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1yTick Tock is no different than any other platform the only difference is people can earn extra money on there by going live and by creating content they pay them pretty good and the government's jealous cuz they don't have their hands and their paws in it that's all it is