Can blockchain save us from a world of rampant, AI-driven IP theft?

• 📈 Trending Up: Unified Teams (at last) … Trunk Tools … Japanese exports … Civ VII … cute EVs … India-Japan relations …

• 📉 Trending Down: Buying Twitter’s debts … Cisco’s staffing and morale … international rules …

• 🤔 What Else?

  • Look, antitrust is not just Lina Khan’s game: India antitrust team is skeptical of the “merger between the media assets of Walt Disney and Indian-owned Reliance Industries,” Reuters reports, because the deal “could harm competition due to both parties' power over cricket broadcast rights.”

    • Well, well, well!

  • A federal judge recently hit the brakes on the “planned sports streaming venture by ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros.” It’s almost like content purchasers want to pool their spend so that they can limit supply, and thus have stronger pricing leverage against the consumer in both India and the United States!

    • Too bad.

  • The U.S. FTC gets a lot of stick for doing its job with more vigor than most American business leaders are accustomed to. But look around, y’all. It’s not just us.

Via Henrik Dønnestad

The value of creative work

Magazine giant Condé Nast has inked a deal with OpenAI. The agreement, OpenAI writes, will see “content from top brands like Vogue [and] The New Yorker” inside its products “including ChatGPT and our SearchGPT prototype.” (Note that Condé Nast is owned by Advance Magazine Publishers, which owned about 25% of Reddit before its IPO; Reddit has a major deal with Gemini-maker Google.)

Also out this week: Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper landed a nine-figure deal for her podcast.

Folks are paying for the written and spoken word, which warms my heart. But the battle for effective IP ownership in the AI era is far from won. This week, for example, news broke that AI model unicorn Anthropic is being sued by a number of authors who claim copyright infringement. Recall that the New York Times has sued OpenAI over related claims.