The Professor is in a good position to (decide if to) sue somebody. From the headlines I thought that's what this is about, because otherwise the headline should suffice with Professor minus "Law".

Of course there is precedent eg. with Techno Viking, a "meme" which is also difficult to attribute to a single person (but each individual hoster who neglects the man's rights).

That's not new, but that it generates news "because AI" is not surprising. People just need reminded that people oughta be reponsible. The issue is broader because incomprehensible neural networks are also used in eg. thread recognition. So employers may be worried about accountability, how much manual verification is needed.

Of course this too is nothing new, since all kinds of software has security holes buried under layers of complexity.

You might simply be under the missapprehension that news means new: »Meaning "tidings, intelligence of something that has lately taken place" is from early 15c.« (etymonline). It fits that the root of the word is probably related to "now". In Latin, whence the English word was loaned as a calque of nova, there is another word nuntius "messenger, message", which isn't even derived directly from novus. Surely this is not a supernova to you. Talk about recurrent networks, eh.

Just saying, as it were, the news item flared up because many many people have taken notice of problems that we barely understand.