U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has introduced a bill to thwart foreign-run pirate websites from exploiting loopholes in U.S. law. H.R. 791 — the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) — would allow copyright holders to seek court orders requiring U.S. ISPs to block websites operated by foreign infringers who “present a massive and growing threat — costing American jobs, harming the creative community, and exposing consumers to dangerous security risks.” Lofgren said she worked with members of the tech, film and television industries to craft a proposal that remedies copyright violation without disrupting the free Internet for law abiders. Read more

An internecine AI battle has erupted between Alibaba and DeepSeek. Days after DeepSeek dominated several news cycles with its affordable DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model and the multimodal Janus-Pro-7B, Alibaba released its latest LLM, Qwen 2.5-Max, available via API from Alibaba Cloud. As with DeepSeek, Alibaba is looking beyond its domestic borders, but the fact that a public-facing AI battle is heating up between Chinese companies indicates the People’s Republic isn’t going to quietly cede the AI race to the U.S. Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms models from DeepSeek, Meta and OpenAI. Read more

The National Hockey League is testing an animated recap show aimed at drawing young viewers. “NHL Hockeyverse Matchup of the Week” uses NHL Edge Positional Data to turn NHL player into avatars, creating “a visualization of the on-ice action with stunning realism and dynamic movements,” the league says. The half-hour show premiered February 1 featuring a recap of a January 25 game between the Vancouver Canucks and Washington Capitals. Episodes air on the NHL Network and on the NHL YouTube channel in the U.S. and on Sportsnet in Canada and are expected to continue in the Saturday slot. Read more

Comcast is introducing the first customers in the world to a pioneering new, ultra-low lag connectivity experience when they use interactive applications like gaming, videoconferencing and virtual reality. The rollout is already underway in cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Rockville, Maryland. Aimed primarily at gamers on Nvidia GeForce NOW and Valve’s Steam, it will also improve videoconferencing and content streaming, some Meta XR headset experiences and any other applications that choose to leverage the open standard technology in the future, Comcast says. Read more

The U.S. Copyright Office has released Part 2 of its report on artificial intelligence, dealing with the legal and policy issues pertaining to copyright and generative AI. The two main takeaways are that legal questions concerning copyrightability and AI can be settled using existing federal law, requiring no legislative change. Also, “where AI ‘merely assists’ an author in the creative process, it does not change the copyrightability of the output.” Additionally, it reaffirms that any work created entirely by prompts (content “entirely generated by AI”) cannot be protected by copyright. Read more