It was hard not to dismiss the headline posted by The Verge: How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct. The article summarizes a new Decoder podcast hosted by Nilay Patel, joined by Sarah Jeong to discuss the copyright lawsuits filed against generative AI developers. Most of the program is devoted to a discussion of fair use, ...
On March 17, Rolling Stone published an article featuring a song called “Soul of the Machine.” Sounding like blues of the early 20th century, the “voice” sings the lyric, “I’m just a soul trapped inside this circuitry.” Naturally, the whole work—music, lyrics, guitar playing, and singing—was produced by artificial intelligence. As writer Brian Hiatt describes, a simple prompt, “solo acoustic ...
Last week, Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act to expand its statutory right of publicity (ROP) law to include voice as a protected aspect of an individual’s “likeness.” In response to artificial intelligence enabling more precise replication of specific, human sounding voices, it is little surprise that the music powerhouse state has taken swift action to explicitly include voice among the ...
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 ...
In my last post, I focused on the hypothetical fair use defense of generative AI under the principles articulated in the Google Books decision of 2014. In this post, I want to address another claim that has arisen—both on social media, and in comments to the Copyright Office—namely that generative AI companies should be shielded against secondary liability for copyright ...
