Kate Knibbs (Hacker News):
Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States. In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
[…]
Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Copyright Lawsuit Legal The Media Web
Matt Gemmell (Mastodon):
Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs.
In recent years we did get an emergency-use shared/household M2 MacBook Air, which my wife would occasionally take out of the cupboard. Now, that laptop has become my computer.
[…]
I loved the slab of glass, and the Apple Pencils of each generation. I loved that I could rotate it, and write on it, and pinch-zoom it, and connect it to a keyboard, and just figuratively hug the thing. It was most certainly The Future, and very much on track to become everyone’s full-time computer after another few versions of the OS. Then another few versions. Then another few.
I believed in the promise of the form factor and the interaction language, and the human-focused nature of the device, so much that I made iPad-only a part of my identity. And I really was happy. But eventually, without me really noticing, things started to happen.
[…]
iPads are slower than Macs, subjectively, and almost regardless of hardware. I’m most recently comparing an M2 MacBook with an M4 iPad, but the experience is the opposite of what the hardware might naively suggest.
Eric Schwarz:
Stories of switching between Macs and iPads are nothing new, but this particular post struck a chord with me—regular readers know that I have had some sort of iPad since the very beginning and there were plenty of stints where the iPad was my primary computer. However, I sold mine last November, not because I disliked the device, but felt that it simply was unnecessary and I was naturally using it less and less.
[…]
Apple has done iPadOS a disservice for way too long—every new first-party app seems to be iPhone-only (Sports, Journal, Invites) and sometimes features come to the iPhone, but not the iPad. This creates an attitude of if Apple doesn’t care about the iPad, why should you? At least the Mac is different enough that you can put up with the inconsistencies and/or rely on some older alternatives. I like a lot of the intentions of iOS to simplify and rethink the computing experience, but way too much either feels incomplete or abandoned.
Matt Birchler:
One of the superpowers of the Mac is that it can do many things at once. Obviously, the iPad has multitasking, but not in the way the Mac does. The basic concept of iPad multitasking is that you need to be able to see an app for it to be reliably working. If you can’t see an app, there is a select list of things it can keep doing in the background, but most things die immediately, and it may be booted from memory at any point.
[…]
There are trade-offs to customization and user control, but this is a fundamental difference between the Mac and iPad that can’t be overstated. As a simple example, there have been many window management apps on the Mac forever, so people who don’t love the built in option have had an embarrassment of riches in terms of options, but if you don’t like Stage Manager on the iPad, your only hope is that Apple updates it to your liking someday.
Previously:
Update (2025-02-14): Craig Grannell (Mastodon):
In his post, Matt notes part of the problem with the iPad is that it’s never been strongly defined. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, it was positioned somewhere between a phone and a laptop. Since then, users have argued for it to take over the capabilities of both devices – but especially the latter. However, while the iPad has the power of Apple’s ‘proper’ computers, it lacks the flexibility and, in some cases, utility. All of which is by design.
What some people tend to forget is that Apple is very opinionated on wanting people to buy (at least one) Mac alongside any Apple mobile devices. It’s my ongoing belief that arbitrary barriers have therefore been – at best – left in place for that purpose.
For example, the iPad never got true virtual memory or sideloading, and the Mac never got touch.
Update (2025-02-16): Rui Carmo:
You see, the iPad’s attrition has also been getting to me lately–as a case in point, I haven’t used my iPad Pro for anything other than reading and annotating PDFs in months, and that was before I, too, sort of adopted the Supernote platform as a way to capture my thoughts and early drafts.
I have the excuse of (literally) using all the platforms, but even as I type this on my Mac thanks to effortless Reading List syncing, a lovely keyboard and my grand pair of huge displays, I can’t help but feel that the iPad has been left to languish in a sort of limbo.
Update (2025-03-24): Mac Power Users:
Author Matt Gemmell joins Stephen and David to talk about using an iPad as his only computer for eight and a half years and why he recently switched back to the Mac.
Via Steve Troughton-Smith:
Great discussion about the compromises you have to make to use iPad as a primary computer that you take completely for granted.
From my perspective, I’m really tired of the iPad-as-platonic-ideal-for-unitasking rationalization. If there ever was an overarching goal for iPad, it died with SJ. It’s been 15 years and almost nothing you can do on an iPad is better, easier, or faster than on a Mac. It’s a baby computer with baby apps, where Apple will nanny every thing you do.
iPad is an incredible form-factor trapped in an idealistic tunnel-vision fantasy, that could have been resolved at any point in the past five years with the ability to dual-boot or virtualize macOS. You could give iPadOS fifteen more years of progress at its current rate, and it still wouldn’t be as powerful, flexible, useful as the macOS of today. There’s just no path to fixing this — not with Apple’s resources, not with Apple’s focus on a dozen supposedly-more-important things.
MarkV:
If you look at the amount of people they put on the Car project and on Vision Pro, I don’t see engineering availability as a real constraint for Apple.
I think Apple is allocating resources to products based on estimated growth potential, and when one of their product lines hits maturity / low growth (iPad, aTV, Mac, etc) they shift resources to what they hope could be the Next Big Thing (AR, car, robotics, …).
That’s a management choice though, not a constraint.
mako:
I tried for so long to make the iPad my main computer; just gave up after the million papercuts. The MBA (while needs an 11 or 12” version), is wonderful and the iPad Mini is a wonderful “baby computer” sidekick.
iOS Multitasking iPad iPadOS iPadOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia
Tim Hardwick:
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) is said to have been critically examining Apple’s practices and holding discussions with the company since last year, specifically about its 30% commission on in-app purchases and restrictions on external payment services, according to the outlet’s sources.
Chinese regulators are said to be particularly focused on whether Apple’s fees for local developers are unreasonably high. They’re also examining if the company’s prohibition of third-party app stores and payment methods stifles competition and negatively impacts Chinese consumers.
Antitrust App Store China iOS iOS 18 Legal
Gus Mueller:
Has anyone successfully come up with strategies for opting into NSDocument’s autosavesInPlace, but only for certain file types? I’ve looked into overriding scheduleAutosaving and friends, but nothing really works. TextEdit just throws up an alert saying “hey, lossy file format”. Is this the best I can do?
Brian Webster:
The issue is if you Save As where the original file type supports auto save but the new one doesn’t (or vice versa). The override is a class method and not an instance method, so there’s no way for the existing instance to flip its auto save boolean to reflect the new file type.
This is an interesting API problem. The core issue is that NSDocument wants you to have a single subclass for each family of file types that can be mutually converted via Save As. The configuration is done at the class level, so it assumes that each file type is just a different flavor that works in the same way.
One could argue that the Cocoa document architecture is missing several abstractions that would be needed for a proper general solution. The basic stuff both easy and quite configurable, with a small API surface, but to go beyond that you need to reimplement a lot yourself or try to hack it into the desired shape.
Dave DeLong:
Override NSDocumentController to provide unique NSDocument subclasses for each document so that each one can swap its own +autosavesInPlace method IMP without fear of messing up other documents, while also still preserving KVO behavior?
Update (2025-03-12): Gus Mueller:
Autosave has also had a revamp. There are three options now: “Off”, “Native Acorn Images”, and “All Images”. The default is set to saving native images (.acorn).
In Acorn 8.0 (and previous versions), when autosave was enabled, non-native files (.jpeg, .png) would open without a reference to the original file on disk. This is no longer the case in Acorn 8.1, where non-native files open with a reference to the original file, and pressing ⌘S will save back to the original, regardless of the autosave setting.
Why the change? I found myself wanting autosaving of files where full fidelity would always be preserved (which is what happens when you save .acorn files), but that behavior didn’t always make sense when opening a .jpeg file. JPEG files are lossy, so opening and saving the image multiple times would degrade the quality of the image. That’s not awesome. And you would also lose the edibility of text and layers.
Acorn Cocoa Key-Value Observing (KVO) Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Objective-C Runtime Programming TextEdit
