The question of where AI sits in the legal personhood stack isn’t as simple as it may seem (i.e. “nowhere”) — but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today declared that, as with other intellectual property, only a person can receive its official protections. The news arrived via “guidance,” which is to say official policy but not ironclad rule, set to be entered into the federal register soon.
Source: US Patent Office: AI is all well and good, but only humans can patent things | TechCrunch
In an apparent attempt to undercut Taylor Swift’s potential influence on the presidential election later this year, former president Donald Trump issued a statement on his Truth Social platform Sunday claiming credit for the 2018 Music Modernization Act. However, Dina LaPolt, a key attorney behind the MMA, disputed Trump’s claims in a statement Sunday. “Trump did nothing on our legislation except sign it.”
Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience. What will emerge in the wake of mass extinction, Brian Morrissey, another media analyst, recently wrote in his newsletter, “The Rebooting,” is “a different industry, leaner and diminished.” In fact, he told me, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the end of the mass-media era.
Source: Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?
Artists have secured a small but meaningful win in their lawsuit against generative artificial intelligence art generators. U.S. District Judge William Orrick, in an order issued on Thursday night, rebuffed arguments from StabilityAI, Midjourney and StabilityAI that they are entitled to a First Amendment defense arising under a California statute allowing for the early dismissal of claims intended to chill free speech.
Source: AI Companies Take Hit as Judge Says Artists Have “Public Interest” In Pursuing Lawsuits
OpenAI’s image generator DALL-E 3 will add watermarks to image metadata as more companies roll out support for standards from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). The company says watermarks from C2PA will appear in images generated on the ChatGPT website and the API for the DALL-E 3 model. Mobile users will get the watermarks by February 12th.
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.
Source: Meta Calls for Industry Effort to Label A.I.-Generated Content
The tech giant said on Thursday that it was joining an effort to develop credentials for digital content, a sort of “nutrition label” that identifies when and how a photograph, a video, an audio clip or another file was produced or altered — including with A.I. The company will collaborate with companies like Adobe, the BBC, Microsoft and Sony to fine-tune the technical standards.
Source: Google Joins Effort to Help Spot Content Made With A.I.
The company says it delivered USD $9 billion last year to recipients across record companies and music publishers, plus independent distributors, performance rights organizations, and collecting societies. According to Spotify, the $9 billion figure means that its annual payouts to music rightsholders have “nearly tripled in the past six years”.
Spotify has paid audiobook publishers “tens of million” since the launch of audiobooks on the platform’s premium subscription last year in the US, UK, and Australia. And at the top of that list sits Britney Spears’ memoir, “The Woman in Me,” the most listened to book on the service. The Stockholm-headquartered audio streaming giant says users have listened to over 90,000 unique titles from the platform’s catalog.
Source: Spotify Paying Audiobook Publishers ‘Tens of Millions’ of Dollars
Amid the Universal Music-TikTok licensing dispute, industry companies and organizations are coming out in support of the major label. The likes of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and Downtown Music are backing Universal Music Group (UMG) in the much-publicized disagreement, which, as we reported, kicked off with an open letter last week.
Source: Industry Players Back Universal Music in TikTok Dispute