By now, many people who pay attention to artists’ rights have read the David Segal New York Times story published on January 13 about the amateur folk duo Bad Dog discovering their songs on major streaming platforms, but with different titles and attributed to a different creator. In what should be a surprise to nobody, it is easy to game ...

The acronym stands for No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas and Unauthorized Duplication. Introduced as a discussion draft by Rep. Maria Salazar et al., the No AI FRAUD Act would create a novel form of intellectual property in direct response to the use of AI to “clone” a likeness. With parallels to right of publicity (ROP) law, combined with a copyright-like, ...

Lately, we’ve seen several headlines and comments from tech giants say that AI ventures simply cannot succeed if they are forced to contend with the copyrights in the billions of works they have scraped for the purpose of machine learning (ML). When these headlines are paired with the rampant assertions that ML is inherently fair use—a subject addressed in last ...

Last week, writer and broadcaster Andrew Keen invited me to his podcast Keen On to talk (of course) about artificial intelligence. When we got to the subject of the New York Times lawsuit against Open AI and Microsoft, I noted that 1) it is arguably the strongest copyright case presented to date against an AI developer; 2) that it would ...

When I was planning to start The Illusion of More, I contemplated a category of posts under the heading We Don’t Need This. Although abandoned, I thought it might be an editorial framework for articles about innovations that really aren’t innovative, and the low-tech invention that originally inspired the idea was the kiddie-car/shopping-cart hybrid. In case you haven’t had the ...