Sony's failed war against Internet piracy may doom other copyright lawsuits

Sony's failed war against Internet piracy may doom other copyright lawsuits

fivenewscrypto    mai 12, 2026   

Sony and other major record labels recently suffered a thorough defeat at the Supreme Court in their attempt to make Internet service providers pay huge financial penalties for their customers' copyright infringement. Sony's loss is certain to have wide-ranging effects on copyright lawsuits, offering protection for ISPs, their customers, and potentially other technology companies whose services can be used for both legal and illegal purposes.

In Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the Supreme Court ruled that cable Internet firm Cox is not liable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when its customers use their broadband connections to download or upload pirated materials. Music copyright holders claimed that once Cox was informed that specific users repeatedly infringed copyrights, it should have terminated their accounts.

A jury agreed with Sony in 2019, hitting Cox with a $1 billion verdict. While the damages award was overturned by an appeals court in 2024, that court gave Sony a partial win by finding that Cox was guilty of contributory copyright infringement—a type of secondary liability for contributing to others' infringement.

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Do you take after your dad’s RNA?

Do you take after your dad’s RNA?

fivenewscrypto    mai 11, 2026   

On a bright afternoon in Jiangsu, China, Xin Yin is playing personal trainer to some mice. One by one, he sets the rodents on a miniature treadmill that starts slow and gradually speeds up. These littermates are born athletes, able to run farther with less lactic acid buildup than average laboratory mice.

The secret to their speediness isn’t carried in their genes—the animals come from the same genetic stock as a group of control mice. And they haven’t received any special training. Instead, their fitness seems to stem from their father’s exercise habits before they were even conceived. It’s a finding suggesting that running might benefit not just the exerciser, but also his unborn children.

“I was very surprised when I first saw the data,” says Yin, a biochemist at Nanjing University.

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Huge landslide created a 500-meter-high tsunami in a major tourist area

Huge landslide created a 500-meter-high tsunami in a major tourist area

fivenewscrypto    mai 11, 2026   

At 5:26 am local time on August 10, 2025, a massive wedge of rock with a volume of at least 63.5 million cubic meters detached from a mountain above Alaska’s Tracy Arm fjord. The falling rock plummeted into the deep waters at the terminus of the South Sawyer Glacier and caused an initial 100-meter-high breaking wave that tore across the fjord at speeds exceeding 70 meters a second. When this wave hit the opposite shoreline, it surged up the steep rocks to a height of 481 meters above sea level.

“It was the second highest tsunami ever recorded on Earth,” says Aram Fathian, a researcher at the University of Calgary and co-author of a recent Science study that reconstructed this event in detail. “But until now, almost nobody heard about it because it was a near-miss event,” he adds. There were no injuries or fatalities reported following the Tracy Arm fjord tsunami, mostly because it happened early in the morning. But we might not be so lucky next time.

Landslide megatsunamis

Earthquake-generated tsunamis usually reach runup heights of a few tens of meters when they strike land. Landslide tsunamis, like the one that happened in Tracy Arm, are often more localized but also way more violent. When millions of tons of rock suddenly fall into a confined body of water like a narrow fjord, the variation in water depth and the direct displacement of the water column produce extremely high waves. Since 1925, scientists have documented 27 such events with runups exceeding 50 meters. The highest was the 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami, which reached 530 meters.

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The new Wild West of AI kids’ toys

The new Wild West of AI kids’ toys

fivenewscrypto    mai 11, 2026   

The main antagonist of Toy Story 5, in theaters this summer, is a green, frog-shaped kids’ tablet named Lilypad, a genius new villain for the beloved Pixar franchise. But if Pixar had its ear to the ground, it might have used an AI kids’ toy instead.

AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category. It’s easier than ever to spin up an AI companion, thanks to model developer programs and vibe coding. In 2026, they’ve become a go-to trend in cheap trinkets, lining the halls of trade shows like CES, MWC, and Hong Kong’s Toys & Games Fair. By October 2025, there were over 1,500 AI toy companies registered in China, and Huawei’s Smart HanHan plush toy sold 10,000 units in China in its first week. Sharp put its PokeTomo talking AI toy on sale in Japan this April.

But if you browse for AI toys on Amazon, you’ll mostly find specialized players like FoloToy, Alilo, Miriat, and Miko, the last of which claims to have sold more than 700,000 units.

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Manufacturing qubits that can move

Manufacturing qubits that can move

fivenewscrypto    mai 11, 2026   

To get quantum computing to work, we will ultimately need lots of high-quality qubits, which we can tie together into groups of error-corrected logical qubits. Companies are taking distinct approaches to get there, but you can think of them as falling into two broad categories. Some companies are focused on hosting the qubits in electronics that we can manufacture, guaranteeing that we can get lots of devices. Others are using atoms or photons as qubits, which give more consistent behavior but require lots of complicated hardware to manage.

One advantage of systems that use atoms or ions is that we can move them around. This allows us to entangle any qubit with any other, which provides a great deal of flexibility for error correction. Systems based on electronic devices, by contrast, are locked into whatever configuration they're wired into during manufacturing.

But this week, a new paper examined research that seems to provide the best of both worlds. It works with quantum dots, which can be manufactured in bulk and host a qubit as a single electron's spin. The work showed that it's possible to move these spin qubits from one quantum dot to another without losing quantum information. The ability to move them around could potentially enable the sort of any-to-any connectivity we see with atoms and ions.

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Trump reportedly plans to fire FDA Commissioner Marty Makary

Trump reportedly plans to fire FDA Commissioner Marty Makary

fivenewscrypto    mai 11, 2026   

President Trump has signed off on a plan to fire Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, though insiders caution that the plan is not final and could change, according to several media reports.

News of the planned axing comes from inside sources who spoke with The Wall Street Journal, which was then confirmed by reporting from Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and Politico. The Post reported that the administration has not decided who would serve as acting director upon Makary's departure.

The planned exit comes after a tumultuous year for Makary, in which the FDA plunged into turmoil and controversy over DOGE cuts, personnel drama, vaccine approvals, gene therapy decisions, abortion pill oversight, and vape regulation.

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ABC refuses to capitulate to Trump admin, fights FCC probe into The View

ABC refuses to capitulate to Trump admin, fights FCC probe into The View

fivenewscrypto    mai 11, 2026   

ABC is fighting back against the Trump administration's attempt to police broadcast television content, saying in a filing that the Federal Communications Commission is violating the First Amendment.

Led by Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC accused ABC’s The View of not complying with the equal-time rule, even though the interview portions of talk shows have historically been exempt from the rule requiring equal time for opposing political candidates. The FCC also opened an unusual review of ABC’s broadcast licenses one day after the president and First Lady Melania Trump called on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a recent joke.

An ABC filing that was made public today said the FCC exceeded its authority in actions that "threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly." The filing is primarily in response to the equal-time investigation, but ABC also seems determined to fight the larger license review.

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