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iRobot Founder Says FTC Treated Blocked Deals 'Like Trophies' as Bankruptcy Follows Failed Amazon Acquisition

Slashdot.org - Mon, 12/22/2025 - 09:40
Colin Angle, the founder of iRobot who built the company from his living room over 35 years and sold more than 50 million Roomba vacuums, watched his creation file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month after what he describes as an "avoidable" regulatory ordeal that killed Amazon's $1.7 billion acquisition bid. In an interview with TechCrunch, Angle recounted the 18-month investigation by the FTC and European regulators that preceded Amazon's January 2024 decision to abandon the deal. The process consumed over 100,000 documents and a significant portion of iRobot's discretionary earnings. Angle said the deal should have taken "three, four weeks of investigation" given iRobot's declining market position -- 12% and falling in Europe, where the leading competitor was only three years old. During his deposition, Angle said he walked the halls of the FTC and noticed examiners had "printouts of deals blocked, like trophies" on their office doors. He entered the process "looking for a friend" and instead encountered the question: "Why should we ever let them do this?" Further reading: WSJ Editorial Board Says Lina Khan Killed iRobot.

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Spotify Says 'Anti-Copyright Extremists' Scraped Its Library

Slashdot.org - Mon, 12/22/2025 - 09:00
A group of activists has scraped Spotify's entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna's Archive, a search engine for "shadow libraries" that previously focused on books. Spotify described the activists as "anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms" and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The activists claim this represents "the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open" and covers "around 99.6% of listens." They appear to have used Spotify's public web API to scrape the metadata and circumvented DRM to access audio files. Spotify insists that this is not a security breach affecting user data. Though the more pressing concern for the music industry may be AI training rather than pirate streaming services -- similar YouTube datasets have reportedly been used by unlicensed generative AI music services.

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