From The United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division: The Antitrust Laws The Antitrust Division enforces federal antitrust and competition laws. These laws prohibit anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition. The Sherman Antitrust Act This law prohibits conspiracies that unreasonably restrain trade. Under the Sherman Act, agreements among competitors to fix prices or wages, rig bids, or allocate customers, workers, or markets, are criminal violations. Other agreements such as exclusive contracts that re ..read more

From The Wall Street Journal: For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle’s Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S. The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon AMZN -1.11%decrease; red down pointing triangle.com under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. “We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators,” Big River says on its website ..read more

In 1909, the year before his death, Leo Tolstoy was visited at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, by the Count S. Stackelberg. Stackelberg was on a mission — persuade Tolstoy to write an article on Abraham Lincoln for The New York World. Tolstoy declined the commission but told Stackelberg a story: Once while traveling in the Caucasus I happened to be the guest of a Caucasian chief of the Circassians, who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history. The fingers of civilization had never reached him nor his ..read more

A question that Perplexity suggested: What is the meaning behind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 136? Perplexity’s Answer to its own question: Sonnet 136 by William Shakespeare, often referred to by its first line, “If thy soul check thee that I come so near,” is a complex and layered poem that uses wordplay and puns to convey the speaker’s desire and emotional plea to the Dark Lady, a character in Shakespeare’s sonnets known for her captivating but elusive affection 1 2 5. Themes and Interpretation Wordplay on “Will” The sonnet is notable for its clever use of the word “Will,” which serves multiple purp ..read more

Prompt: Write a Shakespearian Sonnet about a 16-year-old boy named Tom who is very anxious about asking a girl named Susan to a school play, Much Ado About Nothing Perplexity’s Response: When youthful Tom beholds fair Susan’s grace, His heart doth race within its bony cage. Forsooth, he longs to ask her to a place Where players tread the boards, the Bard their stage. In iambic beats, his pulse doth pound, A sonnet’s rhythm in his chest doth play. The words to woo, in anxious loops abound, Yet fear doth grip his tongue, leads thoughts astray. “Much Ado About Nothing” is the play, A tale of love ..read more

From Perplexity: Prompt: Compare and contrast the factors that have resulted in bestselling authors J.K. Rowling and Stephen King’s success. Note – The links in the response were inserted by Perplexity. Response: Writing Style J.K. Rowling: Rowling’s writing style is often described as clear, accessible, and richly detailed, which has contributed significantly to her broad appeal. Her narrative style in the Harry Potter series combines whimsical fantasy with complex themes, making her books beloved by both children and adults. The progression in the complexity of language and themes throughout ..read more

From The Economist: In 2019 a federal judge named Alan Albright gave a presentation to a group of lawyers. His courthouse in Waco, Texas, where he is the only judge, sits near a sweet shop. The talk was called “Why You Should File Your Next Patent Case Across the Street from the ‘Hey Sugar’”. The intellectual-property lawyers who heard his pitch were apparently persuaded. Less than two years after being appointed to the bench, he had nearly 20% of the country’s patent cases, according to Lex Machina, a legal-analytics firm. By 2021, he had 23%. Trial teams of white-shoe attorneys from New ..read more

From The World Economic Forum: As artificial intelligence (AI) moves beyond performing simple tasks to creating original content, it blurs the lines between humans and machines. In doing so, it challenges a core tenet of many traditional intellectual property (IP) frameworks: only works created by humans are protected by copyright laws. The development and training of AI models also raise another important copyright issue: whether the use of third-party content in that exercise might infringe on the copyright of that content. Emerging use cases around generative AI are disrupting traditional v ..read more

From The Guardian: Staff at technology company Meta discussed buying publishing house Simon & Schuster last year in order to procure books to train the company’s artificial intelligence tools, it has been reported. According to recordings of internal meetings shared with the New York Times, managers, lawyers and engineers at Meta met on a near-daily basis between March and April 2023 to discuss how it could get hold of more data to train AI models. From the recordings, which were shared by an employee of the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company that owns Facebook and Instagram, the ..read more

From The Bookseller: Spotify has revealed data showing that 25% of Spotify Premium users are engaging with its audiobooks offering. The Swedish tech giant said the data indicates that “Spotify is driving a meaningful incremental revenue stream for the publishing community”. “Without Spotify, royalties for independent authors would have increased to 23% from the first quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024, but with Spotify’s addition of audiobooks in Premium, independent authors have seen a 95% jump in their royalties,” the company added. Released on Wednesday 17th April, the data also s ..read more