On Wednesday, January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee presided over a dramatic hearing entitled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. The gallery was filled with family members representing young victims of sexual exploitation, drug-related deaths, and adverse mental health effects of social media that can lead to chronic illness and suicide. The witnesses who provided testimony and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)