Congress has passed, and President Biden has now signed, a bill requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American buyer or American-controlled company within 270 days (possibly extendable to a year), or face having the app banned from the U.S.
Things are not likely to work out quite as neatly as that forced choice would have it.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew issued a defiant statement in response to the bill’s passage proclaiming “we aren’t going anywhere,” and vowing to challenge the law in court. “We are confident, and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts,” he said. “The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we expect to prevail again.”
The U.S. Department of Commerce has proposed new customer verification requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers. The goal of the ‘Know Your Customer’ regime is to prevent fraud and abuse, including piracy. In response to this plan, prominent rightsholders want the department to expand the proposal’s scope to include domain name registrars and registries. Ideally, they argue, domain companies should also be required to take down pirate domains.
According to a new study from Pex, which monitors and analyzes copyrighted content on digital services, TikTok has the most modified audio of all major UGC platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Pex estimates that comfortably more than a third (38.03%) of all songs found on TikTok were speed or pitch-modified in 2023. Not only that, but Pex estimates that the share of tracks on TikTok that are modified is increasing – up from 24.55% in 2022 to 38.03% in 2023.
The standards could allow social media companies to quickly identify content generated with A.I. that has been posted to their platforms and allow them to add a label to that material. If adopted widely, the standards could help identify A.I.-generated content from companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and others that offer tools that allow people to quickly and easily create artificial posts.