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5 Apr 2025

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New Zealand start-up aims to take space transport to new heights
Dawn Aerospace builds space planes and propulsion systems out of their Christchurch workshop. Their next goal is two trips to space, every day.

UK police charge comedian Russell Brand with rape
The charges relate to a number of allegations between 1999 and 2005.

PDF Candy review: A feature-packed free PDF editor
At a GlanceExpert's Rating Pros Many advanced features OCR capability Very easy to use Cons Lacks a single interface, which some users may not like Free version limits you to one task per hour Our Verdict PDF Candy is an impressive free PDF editor that includes many capabilities you’d only expect in a paid tool. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Editor’s note: This review was updated April 3, 2025 to reflect the most current features and pricing. While free PDF editors are easy to find, free PDF editors with advanced features are virtually unheard of. PDF Candy is a rarity, offering top-shelf scanning, multiple file-conversion options, OCR capability, and other features you’d otherwise expect to pay for. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best PDF editors for comparison. PDF Candy design and features The web-based editor isn’t presented as a unified interface but rather as a slate of individual app icons accessible from a single landing page. Altogether there are 44 tools for creating, editing, and converting PDFs. You just choose one, upload the file, and wait for PDF Candy to complete the task. The tool selection is impressive. Naturally, you get a modest editor that lets you edit, mark up, and annotate text. But you’ll also find tools for watermarking documents; adding, rearranging, and splitting pages; extracting images; editing file metadata; cropping and resizing pages; and password protecting PDFs. And, of course, you can convert a variety of popular file formats to PDF and vice versa. PDF Candy’s editing tool lets you edit, mark up, and annotate text in a variety of ways. Once a task is complete, you can download the file to your device or save it directly to Google Drive or Dropbox. If you’re editing multiple files, PDF Candy queues them so you can download them all at one time when you’ve finished your tasks. A small set of AI tools is included that can summarize, rewrite, or translate selected text inside a PDF. These tools appear in a floating toolbar once you highlight a portion of text. The summarizer works well on long paragraphs, offering a condensed version in just a few seconds, while the rewrite tool provides a handful of clearer or shorter rephrasings depending on your prompt. The translate feature appears to auto-detect the source language, but it only translates into English, which limits its usefulness if you’re working in multiple languages. While some users may find PDF Candy’s interface disjointed—the feature icons aren’t displayed alphabetically or according to any other logic I could figure—it’s roughly similar to navigating the apps on your phone. You can drag and drop files or add them by browsing your drive; working with the various editing and formatting tools is easy and intuitive. PDF Candy’s numerous file converters, which represent more than half its toolset, were fast and faithfully maintained document formatting. If all this sounds like too much to expect from a free product, there is indeed a caveat. PDF Candy limits you to one task per hour (should you try to perform another task too soon, it helpfully displays how much time you have left to wait). You can only remove this limit by signing up for a paid plan that will cost you $6 monthly or $48 annually. There’s also a lifetime plan that includes access to the web editor plus a desktop editor for a flat $99 fee. A small set of AI tools is included that can summarize, rewrite, or translate selected text inside a PDF. To edit a document with PDF Candy, you select a tool, upload the file and download it once it completes the task. Nonetheless, PDF Candy’s expansive toolset and straightforward interface make it one of the best options for your most pressing PDF editing needs. Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.

US feds say AI-generated prompt outputs can’t be copyrighted
If you use an AI image or text generator to make a work of “art,” does it belong to you? Or, in more relevant legal terms, can you copyright and sell the output while preventing others from selling it themselves? That’s a huge question hanging over the heads of anyone tempted to use AI tools for commercial products. And according to the latest guidance from the US Copyright Office… well, it’s complicated. The bottom line of the updated Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (PDF) is that a work of art needs “some degree of originality” and “human authorship” in order for it to be eligible for copyright in the United States. Crucially, simply plugging prompts into an AI image generator or text generator does NOT meet this burden. Because the author (or artist, or other relevant creative term) of a work is defined as “the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression,” an AI system cannot meet this burden, even though it’s using input from a human to generate its output. “Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements,” says the report, spotted by Reuters. According to the Copyright Office, there’s simply too much work being done autonomously between the prompt and the output to still consider it made by a person. Commenting on established case law, the report says that “…the Supreme Court has made clear that originality is required, not just time and effort.” One of the determining factors in the report is that an AI system can create a more or less infinite amount of output, somewhat related but basically unlimited in variation, which indicates a lack of human input and control: “The fact that identical prompts can generate multiple different outputs further indicates a lack of human control. […] The black box of the AI system is providing varying interpretations of the user’s directions. Repeatedly revising prompts does not change this analysis or provide a sufficient basis for claiming copyright in the output.” Now, just because something created entirely by feeding prompts into an AI tool isn’t copyrightable doesn’t mean that any use of AI makes a work of art ineligible for copyright. After all, extending that argument to digital art and media tools in general—or even going back to the first uses of cameras to capture still images—would overly limit creative expression and the ability to sell it. “The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output,” says the report. “Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.” This AI-generated zombie Santa appears in a recent Call of Duty loading screen.Activision To give a recent example, Activision’s use of AI-generated still images in something as complex as the latest Call of Duty game doesn’t make the whole game ineligible for copyright. And given its association with a larger commercial product, the images themselves aren’t available for copyright-free use to other companies. Or at least that’s how I’m reading the interpretation. (I am not a lawyer, certainly not a copyright lawyer.) So, how are we going to determine how much AI is too much? Where’s the line for when a product or project uses too much AI-generated content and thus ceases to be “human” enough for it to qualify for copyright? Frustratingly, there’s no clear line as the deciding factor. “Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis,” says the report. That feels like an echo of the famous “I know it when I see it” obscenity test, which has actual legal precedent in the United States. The ambiguity seems inevitable to end in lawsuits. If someone makes, say, an AI tool that can create an entire mobile game from a single prompt, and someone else copies and sells that game on the basis that it can’t be copyrighted, it’ll be down to a judge to determine whether the original work has enough human creativity to qualify for protection. A few things to remember about this situation: one, the law always lags behind technology as a matter of course; and two, this ruling only applies to the United States—and even then doesn’t have the power of law. A new law passed by Congress or an executive order from the president could change some or all of it at any time. When it comes to how AI affects copyright, we’re still very much in the weeds.