Depois de ser processada pela Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) — agência do governo americano responsável por fiscalizar o cumprimento das leis federais sobre discriminação trabalhista — sob a alegação de prática de discriminação religiosa, a Apple firmou um acordo judicial e concordou em pagar cerca de US$150 mil para encerrar o caso na Justiça.

A ação envolvia um funcionário Genius da Apple Reston, localizada no estado da Virgínia (Estados Unidos), com 16 anos de casa e boas avaliações de desempenho. Em agosto de 2023, ele se converteu ao judaísmo e solicitou adequações de escala à rotina da sua religião, não trabalhando durante as sextas-feiras e os sábados (período do Shabat). Depois de alguns meses solicitando esses ajustes de maneira contínua, ele foi demitido.

Do montante total, US$80 mil correspondem a salários retroativos (sujeitos, portanto, aos devidos descontos tributários) e os US$70 mil restantes são relativos a juros e indenizações. A Apple tem até 30 dias para realizar o pagamento.

Essa mesma Apple Store, vale lembrar, foi palco de outra polêmica, na ocasião envolvendo questões sindicais: em 2022, a gerência da loja foi acusada de dissuadir e “constranger” funcionários que se mobilizavam pela sindicalização. Líderes da Maçã teriam usado ainda o exemplo do fechamento das lojas sindicalizadas no Starbucks como um incentivo para a desarticulação dos trabalhadores.

via 9to5Mac

Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit):

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

[…]

As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.

Corbin Bolies:

Suno has long acknowledged that its AI music generator relied on the scraping of millions of songs available across the internet, but a new hack reveals just how the company pulled from streaming services and websites[…] all while user information remained vulnerable.

[…]

“Our goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s. That’s why we build our models around what we call ‘Original Creation, By Design,’” the spokesperson said in a statement. “For example, we intentionally do not use artist names as a category of training metadata because we want our models to help people create brand new songs, not music that replicates other artists’ existing work. It’s also why we built Suno with detection filters that block or prevent a user from using specific artist, song, or album names as prompts, and prevent users from uploading lyrics or sound recordings that match existing works.”

Previously:

• Apple Scraping YouTube for AI Training Data
• Disney vs. Google and OpenAI
• The New York Times Sues Perplexity
• Apple Intelligence Training Lawsuit
• Sora App
• Reuters Wins AI Copyright Case
• AI Companies Ignoring Robots.txt
• The New York Times Sues OpenAI