42% stolen Potter, BBC vs Perplexity, and Anthropic's "win" has a catch

This week's Content Aware brings you Midjourney's (kind of) guardrails, a new attack on LLMs, and Meta winning some and losing some.

Published: 15:06, 26 June 2025

Corbidge comments on...bamboozling AI crawlers
As AIs increasingly siphon traffic, publishers are at a crossroads. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is fighting on our behalf. His firm is pioneering new anti-scraping tools which protect original content and secure fair compensation to boot. The new tool, AI Labyrinth, uses AI generated decoy pages to lure in bots which have ignored "no crawl" directives, wasting their time and resources. As the battle to preserve the value of original journalism is just beginning, Cloudflare is turning AI against the very bots trained to abuse it. Our media minotaur Rob takes a look.
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Harry Potter and the Den of Thieves
Researchers have managed to get Meta's Llama 3.1 70B LLM to reproduce 42% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a verbatim block. The lime big AI is sticking to is that such occurrences are merely "fringe behavior". Well, in this test and on others it wasn't fringe at all. As we argue over copyright, what is "transformative", and what is theft, research like this is invaluable. However, observers point out it may lead to AI companies dropping open models in favour of closed alternatives: Cornell and Stanford researchers could only do their work because they had access to the underlying model.
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BBC vs Perplexity: the scrape debate
The BBC is turning up the heat on AI firm Perplexity, threatening legal action over copyright and claiming it scraped content without so much as a how-do-you-do. As expected, Perplexity denies any wrongdoing, but the BBC wants their articles deleted and a cheque in the mail. This is yet another notch in the belt of the growing struggle over AI's appetite for publisher content, and this one's going to get loud it seems. As it should.
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Midjourney "cracks down"
Midjourney's flashy new video tool has wowed users while also dropping red flags. Disney and Universal no doubt loved that it churns out characters such as Toothless and Shrek without much effort, which might be why Midjourney found enlightenment via guardrails which give you a firm "nope" when you ask for copyrighted characters for videos. Err, but you can still get stills of copyrighted characters. While the legal firestorm brews around cartoon dragons and trolls, it will doubtless be asked why it can block one bunch of copyrighted work but not others. Disney lawyers will chomp hard on that, and the rest of us will be waiting for the answer.
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Meta won the fight, not the war
Meta scored a legal win as a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit from 13 authors, including Sarah Silverman, who accused Meta of training their AI on books without permission. The reason: the authors couldn't prove real market harm. Although Meta won, the judge agreed that training on copyrighted materials is illegal, just not in this case. This decision is a boost for AI firms betting on fair use as their legal shield, and a wake up call for authors and publishers who'll need stronger arguments (and receipts) if they want to win in court.
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Future of Media Awards: the time to vote is now
Head's up! Tonight's the final curtain to get your entries for great work in digital media submitted in Press Gazette's Future of Media Awards. Don't miss you chance - get those submissions in before the clock runs out! The deadline is at 11:59 PM BST.
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Anthropic wins fair use, but faces piracy trial
Anthropic scored a legal win after a US judge ruled that using legally purchased books to train its AI falls under "fair use". It would appear that transforming text into machine smarts counts as creativity now, and that "transformative" question is likely one that will be returned to in law at a later date. It's certainly too early for Anthropic to celebrate still, since Judge Alsup also pointed out that stashing seven million pirated books in a "central library" isn't exactly fair play and damages could be awarded. That part's heading to trial in December. Is AI rewriting the rules of copyright, or just testing how far it can bend them? It's not far off to say "both".
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SEO is dead, long live SEO!
Some rush to claim SEO is dead, but it's far from it. While AI search is considered a shiny new toy, it's still playing on the same old instruments: structured content, authority, and good indexing. LLMs might answer differently, but they are still pulling from the SEO playbook. SEO detective Lily Ray shares her insight.
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Non-profit leaders spill the beans on crisis management
This month at The Institute for Nonprofit News Day (INN), a packed house tuned in for a panel on "Leading Organizations Through Change (And Sometimes Crisis)". Top non-profit news executives from The Texas Tribune, The Intercept, and Resolve Philly spilled hard-earned wisdom on handling leadership shake-ups and controversy. Boardrooms and newsrooms took notes, and Nieman Lab shares what they learned.
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UK targets Google with new search regulations
UK competition watchdog the CMA is gearing up to put Google on a tighter leash with "strategic market status." That means users might soon get a menu to pick their favourite search engine, publishers could get a say in how their content shows up in AI answers, and fair play rules might shake up the rankings. The CMA's just getting started - more rules on ads and competition could land by 2026. As expected, Google's already grumbling that all this fuss might slow down new UK product launches.
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AI Mode lands in Search Consoles
Google AI Mode data has finally shown up in Search Console, counting clicks and impressions a bit differently than the norm to keep things interesting. It seems to be a whole new game, and Brodie Clark has the scoop on the rules.
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Musk, FTC, and Media Matters: a retaliation showdown
Liberal watchdog Media Matters has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Trade Committee, claiming it's under investigation for reporting on extremist content on X. According to the suit, Elon Musk didn't take kindly to the bad press. Now the watchdog says it's facing a probe which it says is more about political payback than policy. Grab your popcorn.
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Meta under fire for AI labelling failures
Meta's Oversight Board has fired another barrage, calling out the social giant for its patchy approach to labelling AI-manipulated media, especially audio and video. With the company leaning on third parties and stumbling over consistency, questions over transparency are pilling up. With 60 days to respond, the response might give a hint at what we can expect its approach to be towards deepfakes and doctored content.
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