from the rejected-at-the-rim dept

A little over a year ago, we wrote about a fairly silly lawsuit filed against Netflix (and Warner Bros.) by Pepperdine University in California for trademark infringement. At issue is the Netflix show Running Point, which is a fictionalized story of a female executive thrust into ownership of a professional basketball team, inspired by the Lakers’ Jeannie Buss, who is also an Executive Producer on the show. The show’s fictional team, which is supposed to be a reference to the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, is called “The Waves”. Pepperdine’s sports teams are also called “The Waves”, which the school claimed made all of this trademark infringement.

They were wrong about that, as we said in the previous post. Creative works are given wide latitude in trademark law, specifically in that the Rogers test typically applies. Even in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s terrible ruling on parody in the case of the Bad Spaniels and Jack Daniels lawsuit, this was always a situation in which the Rogers test would definitely apply. Specifically, SCOTUS’ decision that Rogers doesn’t apply when the offending trademark is used as a source identifier, because we’re talking about a fictional team used in a wider work of fiction, meaning the use isn’t an identifier or any source.

Netflix and Warner petitioned for dismissal for those very reasons and the now the court has agreed and the suit has been dismissed.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela said ‌on Tuesday , opens new tab that the fictional Los Angeles Waves basketball team in “Running Point” did not violate the Malibu, California, school’s rights because the show did not use the “Waves” name and ​logo as trademarks.

The ruling goes into much more detail, of course. It very specifically examines whether the Rogers test applies, deciding it does based on the usage. For example:

Here, Plaintiff fails to allege that the Waves mark was used by Defendants to exploit the success of Plaintiff’s sports teams or to create an association between the Running Point series and Pepperdine’s teams. Rather, at most, the FAC shows that the Waves mark is “immediately recognized” to identify the Running Point series, and that its use is synonymous with the series. These allegations, which Plaintiff concludes show that the Waves mark is used to “identify the show” are still not sufficient to show that the Waves mark was used as a designation of source for the series. Plaintiff’s repeated use of the words “identify” and “source-identification” do not actually show how the Waves mark was used to identify the source of the series. Rather, here, Defendants clearly claim to be the source of the series.

Finally, the Court is not persuaded by Plaintiff’s arguments regarding the marketing of the show or Defendants’ behavior in similar uses. Although Plaintiff alleges that Defendants’ used the Waves mark in marketing the Running Point series, this does not alter the Court’s above analysis that the Waves mark is not used to identify the source of the series. And the fact that Defendants have obtained trademarks in fictional businesses central to their shows in the past again does not show that Defendants have used the Waves mark to identify the source of Running Point here.

The ruling goes on to note that if Rogers applies, the Lanham Act does not. With source identifying out of the equation, the only remaining question is if the use in this case is artistically relevant. As the fictional team the main character owns, the name of that team is obviously artistically relevant.

Pepperdine has been given leave to amend its complaint into something that is actually legally sound, but I’m struggling to understand what that would even be. In lieu of an amended complaint, it seems that some creative works are still protected some of the time from nonsense trademark infringement claims, even in a post Bad Spaniels world.

Filed Under: lanham act, likelihood of confusion, running point, trademark

Companies: netflix, pepperdine

Not long after the thin and light iPhone Air was launched in September, we crowned it the Phone of the Year for 2025 — not because it was the best phone ever, but because it was the most talked about handset at the time (and, arguably, I think it’s still the case today).

True enough, we’ve run a slew of stories on the iPhone Air that either heaped praise or criticised the phone to varying degrees — our full iPhone Air review called it “a new kind of Pro” handset, another of my colleagues called it “baffling”, while a third said they were conflicted about it (after using it for six months).

One major sticking point of the iPhone Air across our coverage was its steep AU$1,799 RRP relative to the specs, as it’s meant to replace the previous iPhone Plus models. My colleagues’ concerns were centred around the single camera lens and small 3,149 mAh battery.

But at a discounted price, especially if it’s as low as this deal I’ve spotted on Amazon Australia for AU$1,297 or 28% off, a current-generation iPhone that looks this good while also packing a powerful A19 Pro chipset would be a hard one to pass up if you’re on the market for a new Apple handset. At this discounted price, the 256GB iPhone Air is cheaper than the equivalent iPhone 17 that currently isn’t seeing any price drops when purchased outright.

How thin and light is the iPhone Air exactly? It measures just 5.64mm, which is a far cry from the iPhone 17’s 8mm thickness and the 17 Pro’s 8.8mm. Even the budget iPhone 17e is still much thicker at a substantial 7.88mm. It also weighs 165g, much lighter than the iPhone 17’s 177g and the Pro’s 206g.

Does its size affect its performance is the real question here.

As mentioned earlier, the iPhone Air is powered by the Apple A19 Pro chipset that’s similar to the processors of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, with benchmarks scoring better than the base iPhone 17. And given it’s now cheaper than the latter, surely that’s a no-brainer.

Governments around the world have been struggling to address the rise of industrial-scale scamming operations based in countries like Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia that have cost victims billions of dollars over the past few years. The operations often have ties to Chinese organized crime, use forced labor to carry out the actual scamming, and rely on vast money laundering networks to collect a profit. They have become so widespread and ingrained in the region that even major international law enforcement collaborations targeting individual scam centers or kingpins haven’t been able to stem the tide.

The FBI said this week that “cyber-enabled” scam complaints from Americans totaled more than $17.7 billion in reported losses last year—likely a major undercount of the real total, given that many victims don’t report their experiences. Some US officials say that a major barrier to comprehensively addressing the issue is the lack of collaboration with Chinese authorities. China’s efforts to address industrial scamming, they argue, appear aimed at reducing the number of Chinese citizens being impacted rather than comprehensively stopping the activity to protect all victims around the world.

“To its credit, China has cracked down on these operations, but it has done so selectively, largely turning a blind eye to scam centers victimizing foreigners,” Reva Price, a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said at a Senate hearing last month. “As a result, the Chinese criminal syndicates have been incentivized to shift toward targeting Americans.”

According to research the commission published in March, Beijing’s selective strategy has helped embolden some Chinese scammers, even those working within China, to continue operating so long as they exclusively target foreigners.

Other US-based researchers have come to similar conclusions. From 2023 to 2024, China reported a 30 percent decrease in the amount of money its citizens lost to scams, while the US suffered a more than 40 percent increase, according to congressional testimony last year by Jason Tower, who was then the Myanmar country director for the US Institute of Peace’s Program on Transnational Crime and Security in Southeast Asia. In response to Beijing’s enforcement dynamics, Tower said at the time, “the scam syndicates are increasingly pivoting to target the rest of the world, and especially Americans.”

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted last year that scam centers have been diversifying their worker pools, shifting from predominantly trafficking Chinese nationals and other Chinese speakers to entrapping people from a broader array of countries and backgrounds who speak various languages. UN researchers attributed this change in part to attackers broadening their targets to include different populations around the world. But they added that the dynamic also seemed to be a reaction to Chinese enforcement and Beijing’s efforts to protect Chinese citizens.

“China is doing more to fight fraud—like orders of magnitude more—than any other country,” says Gary Warner, a longtime digital scams researcher and director of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm DarkTower. “But I would agree that the crackdown by China on people scamming China has squeezed the balloon so to speak and led to more international and American targeting.”

The Chinese government has spent years investing in national safety campaigns warning citizens about the threat of scams and how to avoid falling victim to them. Some of the public discourse attempts to appeal to a sense of national solidarity. There’s a common meme in China, 中国人不骗中国人, literally, “Chinese people don’t deceive Chinese people” that is used to signal trust when swapping restaurant recommendations or job leads. In the context of digital scams, a variant has emerged: “Chinese don’t scam Chinese.”

Marvel Television just dropped the first trailer for The Punisher: One Last Kill, and it is exactly as intense as you would expect from a character who has never been particularly interested in playing it safe.

Jon Bernthal returns as Frank Castle this month on Disney+, and based on what the trailer shows, he is carrying a lot of weight going into this one.

The official synopsis describes Frank as someone who “searches for meaning beyond revenge, when an unexpected force pulls him back into the fight.” That is about as much as Marvel is giving away for now.

Punisher: One Last Kill trailer breakdown hints at major villain reveal

The trailer opens with Frank in a raw, vulnerable state, and clearly wrestling with his past. His old friend Curtis Hoyle appears and tries to get Frank to open up about what is going on in his life.

The way Curtis flashes in and out of the scene leaves his exact status a little ambiguous, though he survived the events of the Netflix Punisher series and is presumed to still be alive.

Frank is shown isolated, sitting in what looks like a lockdown situation surrounded by guards, suggesting he may be in custody or under surveillance at some point in the story.

The trailer then cuts through a series of intense moments. Flashback scenes show Frank’s young daughter in their family home, revisiting the tragedy that led to his transformation into the Punisher in the first place.

There is also a shot of Frank leaving a red flower at a grave marked for Lisa Barbara, his daughter, with a watch resting on the stone beside it. These are the first looks at Frank’s family in years within this version of the character’s story. Curtis’s voiceover cuts through all of this with a blunt warning, telling Frank he has no chance at what lies ahead.

From there, the trailer shifts into full Punisher mode. Frank tears through enemies using high-powered weapons and sheer physical force, jumping from buildings and shooting his way through anyone in his path.

The trailer’s final image is the one fans have been waiting for. Frank stands in his full Punisher gear and skull vest, outside a location called Gnucci’s Restaurant. This little detail is not an accident because the villain in Punisher: One Last Kill is most likely Ma Gnucci.

Who is Ma Gnucci in the Punisher comics?

For those who are not into Punisher comics, Ma Gnucci is one of Frank Castle’s most memorable adversaries. In the comics, she is the ruthless head of the Gnucci crime family, a powerful organized crime figure who operates out of New York City.

After Frank kills her sons, she declares all-out war on him, and what follows is one of the most chaotic and violent storylines in Punisher history. She is also notable for being depicted in a wheelchair, which makes her physically vulnerable but in no way diminishes how dangerous she is.

Her willingness to throw the full weight of her criminal empire at Frank makes her a credible and personal threat. No actor has been assigned the role as of writing, but the Gnucci’s Restaurant sign in the trailer’s final shot makes her involvement feel like a near certainty.

Who is in the cast of Punisher: One Last Kill?

Jon Bernthal leads the special as Frank Castle, a role he first took on in the Netflix Daredevil series before getting his own two-season Punisher show. Returning alongside him is Jason R. Moore as Curtis Hoyle, Frank’s closest friend and a former US Navy personnel.

Curtis appeared in both seasons of the original Netflix Punisher series, and his return here adds important emotional continuity to the story. The special is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, who co-wrote the script with Bernthal himself. Jon Bernthal also serves as an executive producer on the project.

When does Punisher: One Last Kill release on Disney+?

The Punisher: One Last Kill will debut on Disney+ on May 12, 2026, at 6 p.m. PT and 9 p.m. ET. The special presentation lands one week after the finale of Daredevil: Born Again Season 2.

This is not the last you will see of Frank Castle this year. The Punisher is set to appear in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures collaboration arriving on July 31, 2026.

Whether Frank plays a major role or shows up as a supporting presence in Spider-Man BND is still unknown. But the idea of the Punisher and Spider-Man occupying the same story is genuinely exciting, and after seeing what One Last Kill appears to be setting up, I am very much looking forward to finding out.

Amid customer dissatisfaction around Broadcom’s VMware takeover, rivals have been trying to lure customers from the leading virtualization firm. One of VMware’s biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers.

Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that “about 30,000 customers” have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom’s VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today.

“I think there’s no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom,” Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.

Since Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023, numerous VMware users have sought to reduce or end their reliance on VMware technologies. The most common drivers for migrations are that VMware is getting too expensive; users are being forced to bundle products; the company ended perpetual licenses; and VMware has become harder to work with after Broadcom culled channel partners.

Broadcom’s strategy has made VMware unaffordable or impractical for most small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs) and narrowed VMware’s focus to enterprise-size customers.

Nutanix hasn’t specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments.

During this week’s press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter’s most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix’s “strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years.”

“Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform,” he said.

During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores.

Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom’s history of “decent lines of communication” with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had “challenges partnering with them.”

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from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Fadza Madzingira, a digital policy expert with a decade of experience at Meta, Salesforce, Ofcom and currently Twitch, where she leads the policy, outreach and education teams. Together, they discuss:

We’re still yet to find a Ctrl-Alt-Speech 2026 Bingo Card winner — could this week be your lucky day? Play along.

Filed Under: child safety, content moderation, greece, oversight board, trust and safety

Companies: meta, twitch

Apple is closing three of its retail stores this summer, including its first location to unionize. The tech company said it plans to permanently close Apple Store in Trumbull, CT, Escondito, CA, and Towson, MD. The Apple Store location in Towson, was the first where unionized workers and Apple reached a contract agreement back in 2024.

MacRumors published a statement from Apple confirming the closures. The company credited noting “the departure of several retailers and declining conditions” at the shopping centers where this trio of stores are housed as the reason for ending operations. “Our team members at Trumbull and North County will continue their roles at nearby Apple Retail stores,” the statement reads. “Towson employees will be eligible to apply for open roles at Apple in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement.” We reached out to the company for additional comment, and were sent the same statement.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which leads the union the Towson workers had joined, released a statement about the closure. “Apple’s claim that the collective bargaining agreement prevents relocation is simply false and raises serious concerns that this closure is a cynical attempt to bust the union,” the organization said. “We are exploring all legal options and will work with elected officials and allies to hold Apple accountable.”

In short: OpenAI has paused its Stargate UK data centre project, citing the high cost of industrial electricity in Britain and an unfavourable regulatory environment around AI copyright. The project, announced in September 2025 alongside Nvidia and Nscale, had planned to deploy 8,000 GPUs at sites in north-east England, scalable to 31,000 over time. OpenAI says it will move forward “when the right conditions” allow, though it has given no timeline. The pause is a significant setback for the UK government’s AI Growth Zones initiative and arrives as OpenAI prepares for a public listing.

What Stargate UK was supposed to be

Stargate UK was announced in September 2025 as a sovereign AI infrastructure project: a partnership between OpenAI, Nvidia, and British cloud provider Nscale to build data centre capacity in north-east England that would allow OpenAI’s models to run on local computing power. The sites earmarked were Cobalt Park near Newcastle and Blyth, both within the UK government’s designated AI Growth Zones, a framework the government had positioned as a centrepiece of its industrial strategy for artificial intelligence. The project was unveiled during US President Donald Trump’s state visit to Britain, giving it diplomatic as well as commercial significance. The initial phase involved off take of approximately 8,000 Nvidia AI processors, with an ambition to scale that to 31,000 GPUs over time,  capacity that would have enabled OpenAI to serve critical public services, regulated industries such as finance, and national security partnerships without routing data through US-based infrastructure. OpenAI never disclosed the total investment figure associated with the UK project. The broader US Stargate project remains on track with data centre construction under way across the United States, backed by a $40 billion bridge loan SoftBank secured to finance its participation, making the UK pause a geographic exception rather than a signal of retreat from AI infrastructure spending overall.

The energy cost problem

The most concrete obstacle OpenAI identified is the cost of electricity in Britain. UK industrial electricity prices are among the highest of any IEA member state,  more than four times those in the United States, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. For a data centre drawing 100 megawatts, that differential is not a line-item concern but a structural one: the economics of running large-scale AI inference workloads at a site where power costs four times as much as they do in Virginia or Texas are fundamentally different, and that gap compounds as capacity scales. The problem is not simply a matter of electricity tariffs. Grid connection requests in the UK surged from 41 gigawatts in November 2024 to 125 gigawatts by June 2025, with an estimated 75 gigawatts of that queue attributable to data centre projects. Buildings can be constructed in 18 to 24 months; grid connections take three to eight years. That mismatch means that even if a project clears the financial hurdle, it faces an infrastructure queue that the current regulatory and planning framework has not been designed to process at AI-infrastructure speeds. The UK government’s AI Growth Zones policy, published in November 2025, was intended in part to address exactly this bottleneck, but the zone designations do not resolve the underlying grid constraints, and OpenAI’s decision to pause suggests that the policy framework has not yet translated into the conditions that would make the investment viable.

The copyright sticking point

The regulatory concern OpenAI cited alongside energy costs points to a separate and more politically charged problem: the UK’s unresolved approach to AI copyright. UK lawmakers have been working to update the rules governing how AI models are trained on copyrighted material. The government’s preferred approach, a broad text and data mining exception with an opt-out mechanism for rights holders, was rejected by the majority of respondents to the government’s own consultation, with creative industries, publishers, and news organisations arguing that a broad exception would allow generative AI companies to train on their works without compensation or meaningful consent. The consultation produced no consensus, and the government has since delayed any legislative change. For OpenAI, which trains large language models on text scraped from the internet, the uncertainty about whether that training will be lawful, and on what terms, is a material business risk. A UK data centre is not simply a power facility,  it creates legal jurisdiction. If the UK eventually adopts a copyright framework that restricts training data use more tightly than the US, operating infrastructure in Britain could expose OpenAI to liability or compliance costs that do not apply to its US operations. The pause allows OpenAI to wait for that regulatory picture to clarify before committing capital.

A pause, not a cancellation, and the IPO context

The 💜 of EU tech

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OpenAI’s statement was calibrated to leave the door open. “We continue to explore Stargate U.K. and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment,” the company said, framing the decision as contingent rather than final. The timing, however, is notable. OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation in late March 2026, extending participation to retail investors for the first time in a move widely interpreted as groundwork for a public offering analysts expect as early as the fourth quarter of 2026. Companies approaching an IPO typically tighten their capital allocation discipline, avoid open-ended international commitments that could weigh on reported cash burn, and reduce exposure to projects with uncertain timelines. Pausing a data centre project that faces both energy cost headwinds and an unresolved copyright regime fits that pattern. The UK government, which had promoted Stargate UK as a signal of international investor confidence in Britain’s AI ambitions, described the decision as disappointing and said it remained in dialogue with OpenAI. OpenAI’s international Stargate expansion has not been without complications elsewhere either, its Abu Dhabi data centre plans drew an explicit threat from Iranian authorities amid escalating regional tensions, suggesting that sovereign AI infrastructure projects carry geopolitical risk profiles that are becoming a distinct factor in OpenAI’s site selection calculus. Meanwhile, Oracle appointed a new CFO this week to manage its $50 billion data centre construction programme as the central operating partner in the US Stargate project,  a contrast that illustrates where AI infrastructure spending remains active and where it is being reconsidered. The year 2025 established infrastructure access and energy as the primary competitive variables in AI,  and for the UK, OpenAI’s pause is a signal that it has not yet solved either.