E-books And Self-publishing Roundup: September 19, 2017

Enlarge (credit: Bungie) They wanted to make money by selling cheating tools to Destiny 2 players. They may have ended up setting US legal precedent. After a trial in federal court in Seattle last week, a jury found cheat-seller AimJunkies, along with its parent company Phoenix Digital and four of its employees and contractors, liable for copyright infringement and assigned damages to each of them.

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61) Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was sued by textbook publishers last fall for allegedly distributing digital copies of copyrighted works "on a massive scale in willful violation" of copyright laws. But now these shadow libraries and others accused of spurning copyrights have seemingly found an unlikely defender in Nvidia, the AI chipmaker among those profiting most from the recent AI boom. Nvidia seemed to defend the shadow libraries as a valid source of information online when responding to a lawsuit from book authors over the list of data repositories that were scraped to create the Books3 dataset used to train Nvidia's AI platform NeMo.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung) IFixit and Samsung were once leading the charge in device repair, but iFixit says it's ending its repair partnership with Samsung because it feels Samsung just isn't participating in good faith. iFixit says the two companies "have not been able to deliver" on the promise of a viable repair ecosystem, so it would rather shut the project down than continue.

Enlarge / Later theropods had multiple adaptations to varied temperatures. (credit: SCIEPRO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY) Dinosaurs were once assumed to have been ectothermic, or cold-blooded, an idea that makes sense given that they were reptiles. While scientists had previously discovered evidence of dinosaur species that were warm-blooded, though what could have triggered this adaptation remained unknown.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Monday, OpenAI announced the formation of a new "Safety and Security Committee" to oversee risk management for its projects and operations. The announcement comes as the company says it has "recently begun" training its next frontier model, which it expects to bring the company closer to its goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), though some critics say AGI is farther off than we might think.

T-Mobile is buying U. S. Cellular’s wireless operations and certain spectrum assets in a deal valued at $4.4 billion, and further consolidating the industry. T-Mobile would get more than 4 million new customers and control of U. S. Cellular’s wireless operations and about 30% of spectrum assets across several spectrum bands.