The bipartisan ELVIS Act was signed into law on Thursday (March 21) by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee at a honky-tonk in Nashville. The ELVIS Act will officially go into effect on July 1 and will update the state’s existing right of publicity. The bill was introduced in January to update Tennessee’s Protection of Personal Rights law, to include protections for songwriters, performers, and music industry professionals’ voices from the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI).
Source: ELVIS Act signed into law in Tennessee to protect artists’ voice and likeness from the misuse of AI
A forced sale of TikTok within 180 days, as House-passed legislation requires, would be one of the thorniest and most complicated transactions in corporate history, posing financial, technical and geopolitical challenges that experts said could render a sale impractical and increase the likelihood the app will be banned nationwide. A sale would require severing a company worth potentially $150 billion from its technical backbone while being the subject of legal challenges and resistance from China.
Last week, Midjourney, the AI startup building image generators, made a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it change to its terms of service related to the company’s policy around IP disputes. It mainly served to replace jokey language with more lawyerly, doubtless case law–grounded clauses. But the change can also be taken as a sign of Midjourney’s conviction that AI vendors like itself will emerge victorious in the courtroom battles with creators whose works comprise vendors’ training data.
