A unanimous panel affirmed the dismissal of the copyright claims in Doe 1 v. GitHub on Wednesday, the first appellate ruling anywhere on whether generative output can violate the bar on removing copyright management informationConceptSection 1203(c)(3)(B) sets damages of $2,500 to $25,000 for each violation. Multiplied across millions of source files, that per-violation arithmetic is what produced the plaintiffs' demand, and it is the exposure the panel called potentially ruinous.. Judge Eric MillerPersonConfirmed in 2019 out of a Supreme Court appellate practice at Perkins Coie in Seattle and a stint in the Solicitor General's office, an unusually technical background for the circuit that will hear most West Coast software appeals. wrote, joined by Senior Judge Sidney ThomasPersonChief Judge of the Ninth Circuit from 2014 to 2021 and on President Obama's 2010 shortlist for the Supreme Court. That he joined without writing separately signals the panel read the statutory question as clean rather than close. and District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., sitting by designation. Copilot and Codex, the panel held, do not strip identifying information out of an existing copy. They generate something that never carried it.

Miller declined "plaintiffs' invitation to transform run-of-the-mill copyright infringement claims into DMCA claims," then reserved the question everyone actually wants answered: "Copilot's output may in some cases be substantially similar to existing code. We express no view on whether that similarity would allow plaintiffs to assert a claim for copyright infringement." The plaintiffs did win on standing, on academic work showing models sometimes emit memorised training data verbatim, though the panel noted they will need evidence rather than citations at summary judgment. Anonymous open-source programmers brought the suit in 2021 against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI, calling Copilot piracy on an unprecedented scale and seeking more than $9bn. Their contract claims survive in Oakland.

Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the European Union address on Wednesday to turn to Mark Carney, seated in the Strasbourg chamberPlaceParliament divides its work between Brussels and Strasbourg, holding twelve four-day plenary sessions a year in the latter under a protocol France has refused to reopen for three decades. as the first foreign head of government ever to attend one, and say: "I would like to work with you on opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the EU." No such category exists. It was invented in 2026 by Chancellor Friedrich MerzPersonHe floated the idea as a holding pattern for Ukraine: summit attendance, a representative inside the Commission and access to parts of the budget, without full voting rights. Kyiv, which wants accession itself, received it coldly. and would need the assent of all 27 member states to exist at all.

The offer rests on a trading relationship already worth more than 80 percent more in goods and services than it was in 2016, under CETAConceptThe agreement has been provisionally applied since September 2017 but is still not fully ratified by every member state, because its investment-court provisions require approval from each national parliament., and on Canada becoming this year the first non-member admitted to the bloc's defence loan programme. President Trump answered the same day that "if I think it's at all a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things," called the prospect laughable and Canada a terrible trade partner. A 50 percent US tariff on Canadian goods is already in force, with bans on dairy, alcohol and auto imports due later this month. Carney told the Parliament on Thursday that Canada and Europe are "stronger, even stronger together." A summit follows in Montreal next month.

Sponsored Agents, announced Wednesday and limited to the United States, let a user who has seen an advertisement open a separate labelled thread with a bot the advertiser controls, ask about features, sizing or compatibility, and then leave for the advertiser's site. Two lesser features shipped alongside: an ads manager that drafts copy and imagery from the advertiser's own landing page before a human edits it, and opt-in text customisation that rewrites headlines to suit the conversation they appear in and translates them into the reader's language.

From the same day, businesses running customers through HubSpotInstitutionListed on the New York Stock Exchange as HUBS. The lead data flowing back into its system, rather than the campaign tooling going out, is what makes the partnership valuable to both sides. can build campaigns and chase leads without leaving it, and American merchants on Shopify can install an advertising app from its store. OpenAI named the two its first CRM and ecommerce partners. Merchants need no new product feed, because Shopify CatalogConceptThe feed layer Shopify already exposes to ChatGPT for in-chat shopping. Its prior existence is why merchants can launch on day one, and is a real moat against rival advertising surfaces. already feeds the model their inventory.

Goldman Sachs, Sumitomo Mitsui, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Bank of Nova Scotia are among ten lenders providing a $22bn facility to Crux AI, plus a separate $1bn revolver, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Proceeds buy Google's Tensor Processing UnitsConceptGoogle's in-house application-specific chips, built for its own workloads and historically never sold to outside buyers. Renting capacity is the only way it monetises silicon it declines to sell, which leaves the collateral with one manufacturer and no aftermarket.. Collateral is the hardware itself together with Crux AI's customer contracts, and the debt may later be refinanced into longer-dated bonds placed with institutions. Blackstone and Alphabet announced the venture on 18 May with an initial $5bn of Blackstone equity aimed at bringing 500 megawattsConceptRoughly the continuous draw of a mid-size American city. Grid interconnection queues rather than capital are the binding constraint on delivering that, which is why the financing and the buildout are announced on separate timetables. of data centre capacity online in 2027, selling dedicated compute to labs that would otherwise buy from a hyperscaler.

The magnitude check for the window cuts the other way from the usual. No announced merger came near this: the largest strategic transaction by enterprise value touching Wednesday was BrookfieldInstitutionIts data centre platform rests substantially on QTS Realty Trust, taken private in 2021 for roughly $10bn. The Crux venture extends that business from leasing the space to selling the compute inside it.'s roughly $2.9bn scheme for Reliance Worldwide, announced to the ASX on Tuesday evening New York time at $3.38 a share, a 31.5 percent premium, with a go-shop running to 15 October and a $25.3m break fee. Cohere and Aleph Alpha signed an all-stock merger without disclosing updated terms. The biggest capital event of the day was a loan, not a deal.

Ninety minutes after the Fed hiked, the Miami homebuilder reported net earnings of $284m for the quarter ended 31 August, against $591m a year earlier. Diluted earnings fell to $1.19 from $2.29. Home sales revenue of $7.7bn was down 6 percent on deliveries down 3 percent to 20,840, new orders down 9 percent, average selling price off to $372,000 from $383,000, and gross margin down to 15.8 percent from 17.5. Full-year guidance came down to 80,000 to 81,000 homes from 82,000 to 83,000. Executive chairman and chief executive Stuart MillerPersonSon of co-founder Leonard Miller, he has run the company since 1997 and moved to executive chairman in 2018 before taking the chief executive title back, making him among the longest-tenured principals of any S&P 500 builder. said results "were below expectations" and reflected an environment "deteriorated since our last earnings call," putting the 30-year mortgage near 6.8 percent at quarter end "and even higher since."

The operating numbers are the opposite of the earnings. Cycle timeConceptDays from start to closing, the builder's inventory-turn measure. A record low alongside falling deliveries means the constraint has moved off the jobsite and onto the buyer. hit a record 116 days, from 126 a year ago. Construction cost per square foot fell 6 percent year on year and 14 percent from the late-2023 baseline. Starts and sales both ran 4.1 homes per community per month across 1,713 communities. What absorbed the shock was incentives at roughly 12 percent of selling priceConceptBuilder-paid rate buydowns, closing-cost credits and concessions, reported against average price. They are the mechanism by which a rate shock lands in gross margin rather than in volume.. Lennar bought back 3.0m shares for $256m at an average $85.49 and redeemed $400m of 5.25 percent notes, leaving homebuilding debt at 16.6 percent of total capital and fewer than 2.5 percent of its roughly 488,000 homesites on balance sheet after the MillroseInstitutionThe land-banking vehicle spun off in 2025 to hold homesites off the builder's own books. The separation is also what moved the effective tax rate to 26.4 percent from 24.4. spin-off.

Judge Kathleen WilliamsPersonAn Obama appointee who spent roughly two decades in the Federal Public Defender's office for this district, latterly as the defender in charge. That is an unusually defence-side pedigree for a judge weighing a claim of this kind. held a status conference in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday and pressed on the role Jason Reding Quinones, the Trump-appointed US attorney here, played in charging the voting technology company. "I don't think you would have seen any communications from the Attorney General," she said from the bench, "but you would from the U.S. Attorney." The question is aimed squarely at Smartmatic's vindictive prosecutionConceptThe defence must show actual retaliatory motive or facts raising a presumption of it. Because that presumption is hard to earn after indictment, discovery into who inside the Department made the charging call is usually the entire case. theory, filed in March.

A grand jury here returned a superseding indictment in October 2025 adding the company itself to an August 2024 case against individuals, charging Smartmatic, Roger Alejandro Piñate Martinez and Jorge Miguel Vasquez with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices ActConceptCodified at 15 U.S.C. 78dd-1 and following, reaching bribery of foreign officials by issuers and domestic concerns. Enforcement priorities swing sharply between administrations, which is what makes a dropped case against a comparable defendant usable raw material. through alleged bribery of a Philippine election official, with associated money laundering over conduct spanning 2015 to 2018. Piñate is a Venezuelan citizen who lives in Boca Raton. Smartmatic argues that the Department's decision to drop the Gautam Adani prosecution, partly because it was primarily foreign, requires dismissal here; prosecutors answered in July that "Adani bears no resemblance to this case." Williams called the matter in July "the most whack-a-mole of all of my cases."

The court heard argument Wednesday in State of Rhode Island v. Trump, No. 26-1070, over whether the administration may dismantle the Minority Business Development Agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation ServiceInstitutionCreated by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 to mediate private-sector collective bargaining at no charge to the parties. Its disappearance removes a default neutral from thousands of labour negotiations. and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness by firing the staff and cancelling the grants. All three were named in a March 2025 executive order directing seven agencies to eliminate non-statutory functions to the maximum extent allowed by law. Justice Department attorney Simon Jerome argued the district court lacked jurisdiction because no agency adopted any reviewable policy, leaving the administration's choices about agency size "frozen in amber."

Judge Seth Aframe restated the position as letting the government avoid review so long as it acted on the down low. Judge Julie RikelmanPersonBefore her 2023 appointment she was the Center for Reproductive Rights litigator who argued Dobbs for the challengers, making her one of the few sitting circuit judges to have argued a landmark merits case at the Supreme Court. pointed to evidence that two agencies eliminated all employees after the order: "An agency can't work without people." Judge William Kayatta completed a panel appointed entirely by Democratic presidents; he and Rikelman had already declined to pause the injunction below. New York deputy solicitor general Ester Murdukhayeva, for 21 state attorneys general, said the record shows the agencies were functionally shut by indiscriminate firing. The whole dispute turns on whether there is any final agency actionConceptThe Administrative Procedure Act only lets a court set aside action that is final, so an administration achieving a result through personnel decisions rather than a published policy is arguing there is nothing on the table to review. to review.

August consumer prices rose 3.1 percent year on year, the Office for National Statistics reported at 7 a.m. Wednesday, up from 2.9 percent in July and the highest since March. Transport contributed 0.69 percentage points, the largest of any division. Petrol reached 161.3 pence a litre, the dearest since November 2022, with motor fuel up 23 percent on the year. The underlying picture barely moved: core held at 2.6 percent and services at 3.4 percent, both well below January, and food inflation stayed at 1.3 percent, its lowest since 2021. Housing and household services rose to 4.9 percent. This is an energy shock arriving through the pump rather than a broadening of price pressure.

Gilts rallied on the print. The thirty-yearConceptUK government bonds are called gilts for the gilded edges of the original paper certificates. The longest maturity is the one most sensitive to long-run inflation expectations, and the one the 2022 crisis broke. fell almost two basis points to 5.907 percent and the ten-year nearly three to 5.365 percent, with sterling flat. The Monetary Policy Committee announces at noon Thursday, after this edition closed, with markets pricing better than an 80 percent chance of a hold at 3.75 percent and a rise widely expected in November instead. Governor Andrew BaileyPersonGovernor since March 2020 and previously chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, he is the second consecutive holder of the office to face an energy-driven overshoot during his term. said at Jackson Hole that Britain is seeing "quite subdued" second-round effectsConceptThe channel by which an energy spike feeds wage demands and then services prices. It is the specific mechanism that turns a one-off shock into persistent inflation, which is why the phrase is doing so much work.. Brent stood at $108.34 on Wednesday morning before retreating toward $104 on a 7.1m barrel American stockpile build.

Speaking by phone to the All-In SummitInstitutionThe annual conference run by the hosts of the All-In podcast, which has become a venue where senior officials argue policy to a Silicon Valley investor audience rather than to the press corps. on Wednesday, the vice president said that telling the region "you're on your own" would mean "necessarily a worldwide energy crisis, so long as the Iranians keep on shooting at shipping, which we know that's exactly what they would do." He called the president's course the responsible one. It is the first time the case for remaining has been put in those terms, and it arrived on the day three Republican defectors were explaining their votes against it.

The vote itself was Tuesday, outside this window: the House passed House Concurrent Resolution 93ConceptA concurrent resolution is not presented to the president and cannot be vetoed, which is also the basis on which the administration disputes whether it carries any legal force at all. by 220 to 204, directing the removal of US forces from hostilities with Iran, with seven Republicans in favour against four on the June and July resolutions. On Wednesday, Mariannette Miller-Meeks wrote that the president "needs to present a plan to Congress and the American people for how this ends," and Zach Nunn said sustained combat operations now require congressional authorisation. The Congressional Budget Office put the war at $2bn to $3bn a month and roughly $38bn between 28 February and 1 August, about $246m a day. Republicans are seeking up to $73bn in new funding through reconciliation. Iran's deputy foreign minister, Kazem GharibabadiPersonTehran's deputy for legal and international affairs and formerly its permanent representative in Vienna, which made him Iran's lead interlocutor with the nuclear agency., said the same day that Iran's adversaries had been forced to their knees.

Hurricanes teams return to Nike in July 2027 under an agreement exceeding $200m across ten years, the Miami Herald reported Wednesday, with the Associated Press confirming the figure through a person granted anonymity. Neither side currently plans an announcement. The Adidas relationshipInstitutionThe 2015 agreement was reported at the time as the richest in school history and included a then-novel clause tying payments to on-field performance milestones. dates to 2015 and expires on 30 June 2027; ESPN reported the school spent months essentially being recruited on what to do next. The consideration mixes cash, product and marketing.

The return closes a loop. Miami's original Nike arrangement began in the 1980s and was treated as the first of its kind between a school and a sneaker company, and it ran until the Adidas switch. Headline value on an all-school contractConceptThese cover every varsity sport, and the announced total typically blends a cash rights fee with a much larger allotment of product issued at wholesale cost. The cash portion is usually the minority. is rarely what it appears. Nike already dresses most Power FourConceptWith the portfolio that size, a marginal addition is less about volume than about denying a rival a flagship market. Miami is the dominant athletic brand in the third-largest American media market for Hispanic audiences. athletic departments, which makes the question what the category is worth rather than what the apparel costs.

Build a Rocket Boy, the Edinburgh studio behind MindsEye, is winding down, per farewell posts from staff across Wednesday and sources who told Kotaku the closure is permanent. The studio has acknowledged nothing. Its head of talent acquisition wrote that he had taken the place "from 200 to 550 in a short period of time" and would be "seeing BARB through till the very end." MindsEye launched in June 2025 into an open letter signed by almost 100 developers alleging mismanagement and mandated crunch, some of whom filed legal claims; the studio blamed corporate sabotage. IO Interactive's publishing arm stepped down earlier this year, and the IWGBInstitutionA small independent British union that has become the main vehicle for games organising. Its game workers branch repeatedly attacks through data-protection law rather than employment law, because enforcement there moves faster than an unfair-dismissal claim. took legal action over surveillance software installed on work devices.

Heart Machine founder Alx Preston posted the same day that a publisher funding an unannounced title decided that week not to proceed, and that "without this key income for the studio, any other immediate prospects or other funds, nearly everyone at the studio had to be laid off. It's devastating." The Los Angeles studio made Hyper Light Drifter in 2016 and shipped Possessor(s) through Devolver DigitalInstitutionThe Austin publisher has been listed on London's AIM market since 2021, which means its slate decisions are disclosed to public shareholders in a way most games publishers' are not. last November, after cutting staff in November 2024 and twice more in October 2025. Its developers organised wall to wallConceptA bargaining unit covering all frontline employees regardless of craft. The CWA has pushed that shape in games precisely because craft-by-craft units let an employer pick off the smallest groups first. with CWA Local 9003 and won voluntary recognitionConceptAn employer conceding a union without a labour board election, usually after a card-check supermajority. It is faster, and it confers no protection whatever against a studio simply running out of money. in February. No first contract has been reported.