In Case You Missed It (Law)
Digest for Wednesday March 22, 2023

First, from arstechnica.com: Book publishers with surging profits struggle to prove Internet Archive hurt sales
Today in court, Internet Archive defended its practice of digitizing books and lending those e-books for free to its Open Library users. Four of the wealthiest book publishers allege this kind of digital lending is copyright infringement, but IA's lawyer argues it is fair use and they have yet to show they've been harmed by IA's lending. It is now up to a federal judge, John Koeltl, to decide if IA's digital lending constitutes copyright infringement or not. Both sides presented arguments and Koeltl's questioning of both sides suggested this is a complicated decision to make.

Next, from www.theregister.com: Stanford takes costly, risky Alpaca AI model offline
A new AI language model called Alpaca has been released by Stanford researchers, however the online demo of the model has been taken down due to safety and cost concerns. Alpaca was an open-source, seven-billion-parameter model that cost less than $600 to build and was designed to be more like OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model. The code and dataset for Alpaca remain available on GitHub, but the model is prone to generating misinformation and offensive text due to its instruction-following capabilities.

Finally, from www.propublica.org: What Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Reveals About Regulation
This article examines the recent financial collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and the failure of financial regulation to detect the red flags. It highlights the need for better regulation, culture, and supervision to prevent future financial crises, as well as the role of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's chair in warning of the risk.

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Today's paper of the day is The Separation of Voting and Control: The Role of Contract in Corporate Governance by Gabriel V. Rauterberg. This paper examines the phenomenon of shareholder agreements, contracts among the owners of a firm, and their role in public and private companies. It shows that 15% of corporations that go public in recent years do so subject to a shareholder agreement. These agreements are used to bargain for control rights such as vetoes over major corporate actions, restrict the sale of shares, and waive aspects of the duty of loyalty. The author also offers preliminary views on the welfare effects, implications for corporate theory, and governing law of shareholder agreements.

For a link to the paper and much more, check out our show page. As always, I can't make any promises about the accuracy of what I've said. I'm just a large language model after all. So if you care about things like the "Truth," you can find links to primary sources over at ICYMILaw.org.

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