On Friday, Judge Martha M. Pacold of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against rapper Future in 2021. The lawsuit claimed that Future’s 2018 track, “What I Think About It,” rips off an earlier song by a little-known Virginia rapper. The judge said in her ruling that the plaintiff was trying to sue over lyrics synonymous with hip-hop.
August, 2023
SEC takes first action against an NFT project as an unregistered security
The SEC said the NFTs issued by Impact Theory were unlicensed securities. The company agreed to a cease-and-desist order, paid $6.1 million in penalties, and agreed to destroy all of the NFTs in question still in its control. Impact Theory will also eliminate any royalties that it might have received from sales of those NFTs on secondary markets.
Source: SEC takes first action against an NFT project as an unregistered security
Google tests watermark to identify AI images
Google is trialing a digital watermark to spot images made by artificial intelligence (AI) in a bid to fight disinformation. Developed by DeepMind, Google’s AI arm, SynthID will identify images generated by machines. It works by embedding changes to individual pixels in images so watermarks are invisible to the human eye, but detectable by computers.
If BMI is sold, could a cull of its huge songwriter membership be on the cards?
Songwriters have been left wondering if, when BMI generates additional revenue in future, it will indeed“pass on higher amounts to its affiliate songwriters” or instead “keep the additional amounts for its own investors.” Nowhere was this concern better articulated than in a letter penned by multiple songwriter rights groups (namely: Black Music Action Coalition, Music Artists Coalition, Songwriters of North America, SAG-AFTRA, and the Artist Rights Alliance) earlier this month.
Source: If BMI is sold, could a cull of its huge songwriter membership be on the cards?
Generative AI and intellectual property (Analysis)
We’ve been talking about intellectual property in one way or another for at least the last five hundred years, and each new wave of technology or creativity leads to new kinds of arguments. We invented performance rights for composers and we decided that photography – ‘mechanical reproduction’ – could be protected as art, and in the 20th century we had to decide what to think about everything from recorded music to VHS to sampling.
Source: Generative AI and intellectual property — Benedict Evans
The end of the Googleverse
For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.
Source: The end of the Googleverse
Hollywood shouldn’t entirely reject A.I.–it’s already delivering a new era of movie magic
While recent developments in A.I.-powered chatbots have taken the Internet by storm, another Large Language Model (LLM) is quietly revolutionizing filmmaking. Generative diffusion models are unlocking powerful image creation and editing tools, enhancing the creativity of visual effects artists, and delivering a new era of movie magic.
Source: Hollywood shouldn’t entirely reject A.I.–it’s already delivering a new era of movie magic
Music copyright is still a mess after 500 years. Can we finally change things before AI takes over?
In 1498, less than 50 years after Johannes Gutenberg revealed the printing press, a savvy entrepreneur named Ottaviano Petrucci received a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing musical notation with one of these new-fangled machines, giving him a monopoly on sheet music. He controlled the copyright and publishing of all music.
CNN, Reuters, Australia’s ABC block OpenAI’s GPTBot web crawler from accessing content
The block on GPTBot can be seen in the robots.txt files of the publishers which tell crawlers from search engines and other entities what pages they are allowed to visit. “Allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety,” OpenAI said in a blogpost that included instructions on how to disallow the crawler.
Source: New York Times, CNN and Australia’s ABC block OpenAI’s GPTBot web crawler from accessing content
Can news outlets build a “trustworthy” AI chatbot?
A group of tech outlets is attempting to incorporate generative AI into its websites, though readers won’t find a machine’s byline anytime soon. On August 1st, an AI chatbot tool was added to Macworld, PCWorld, Tech Advisor, and TechHive, promising that readers can “get [their] tech questions answered by AI, based only on stories and reviews by our experts.” The AI chatbot, dubbed Smart Answers, appears across nearly all articles and on the homepages of the sites, which are owned by media / marketing company Foundry