On July 11, Senators Cantwell, Blackburn, and Heinrich introduced a bill called the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfake (COPIED) Media Act. One of many AI related bills in Congress, the heart of COPIED is transparency in artificial intelligence through implementation of content provenance information (CPI). COPIED requires development of industry standards to create “machine-readable information documenting the origin and history of a piece of digital content, such as an image, a video, audio, or text.”
The Commerce Committee press release announcing the bill states endorsement by News/Media Alliance, National Newspaper Association, Rebuild Local News, NAB, SAG-AFTRA, Nashville Songwriters, Recording Academy, RIAA, music publishers, artists, and performers. Senator Heinrich, who sits on the Senate AI Working Group, stated, “I’m proud to support Senator Cantwell’s COPIED Act that will provide the technical tools needed to help crack down on harmful and deceptive AI-generated content and better protect professional journalists and artists from having their content used by AI systems without their consent. Congress needs to step up and pass this legislation to protect the American people.”
In a nutshell, the bill calls for advanced, hard to remove, watermarks (or metadata) which would be permanently attached to digital content. In what sounds like a combination of copyright management information (CMI) and a chain of title concept, the development of CPI would enable tracing and validating the source of digital content with a variety of goals, including mitigation of deepfake or modified news stories and use of protected creative content without permission.
The COPIED Act would require the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology to oversee the development and implementation of CPI in collaboration with the Register of Copyrights and the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. If passed and effectively implemented, the law would prohibit removal, alteration, or tampering with attached CPI for deceptive or adversarial commercial practices; and one part of Section 6 of the bill begins, “It shall be unlawful for any person, for a commercial purpose, to knowingly use any covered content….” [emphasis added] This focus on use of material with attached CPI will be of greatest interest to creative professionals concerned about the myriad ways in which their work is used without permission for the development and commercialization of GAI.
Of course, there are miles to go before we see if and when this bill makes progress, at which point it may provoke some familiar arm flapping by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recycling the same rhetoric it used to complain about digital rights management (DRM) technology. EFF lost its campaign to prove DRM under §1201 of the Copyright Act is unconstitutional, while this bill’s proposal for CPI is more reminiscent of §1202 under which it is unlawful to remove copyright management information (e.g., a watermark) for the purpose of copyright infringement. It strikes me that a similar approach would apply to removal of, or tampering with, content provenance information. After all, if it is designed to be as robust and tamper-proof as the bill projects, this would suggest its removal takes some effort and expertise, which itself implies a purpose that is likely to be unlawful.
Stay tuned. We shall see where this goes, but the aims of the COPIED Act strike me as a well-founded good start.
