Tilly Norwood & AI Confusion Will Shape Looming Guild Negotiations, Copyright Experts Agree; Deadline, October 12, 2025

 Dade Hayes , Deadline; Tilly Norwood & AI Confusion Will Shape Looming Guild Negotiations, Copyright Experts Agree

"Handel and Mishawn Nolan, managing partner of intellectual property law firm Nolan Heimann, shared their perspectives during a panel Friday afternoon at Infinity Festival in Los Angeles.

Digital scanning of human actors, for the purposes of using their likenesses in film and TV projects is another tricky area for the unions given how untested the legal questions are, the attorneys agreed.

“I actually have a client right now” whose body is being scanned, Nolan said. “What I received [from the company] was just a sort of standard certificate of engagement. It was all rights, just like you would normally use. And I said, ‘Well, what are you gonna do with the data? What is the scope of the use?’”

Because of the intense pressure on productions to move quickly, Nolan said, “everyone would like to just turn around [a talent agreement] tomorrow.” But the complexities of copyright issues raised by AI, which is evolving at a breakneck clip, require a lot more thought, she argued. “The way that we’ve always done business can’t be done in the future. It can’t be done instantaneously,” she continued. “You have to take a moment and think about, what are you doing? What are you capturing? What are you going to use it for? How are you going to use it? How long are you going to have access to it? And what happens in the long term? Who holds onto it? Is it safe? Is it gonna be destroyed?”"

Pope: Intelligence is seeking life's true meaning, not having reams of data; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, June 20, 2025

 Carol Glatz , United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Pope: Intelligence is seeking life's true meaning, not having reams of data

"Access to vast amounts of data and information is not the same thing as having intelligence, which is uniquely human and requires being open to truth, goodness and the real meaning of life, Pope Leo XIV told AI experts and executives.

"Authentic wisdom has more to do with recognizing the true meaning of life than with the availability of data," he said in a written message released by the Vatican June 20.

"Acknowledging and respecting what is uniquely characteristic of the human person is essential to the discussion of any adequate ethical framework for the governance of AI," he wrote.

The message, written in English, was addressed to people attending the second annual Rome conference on AI, Ethics and the Future of Corporate Governance being held in Rome and at the Vatican June 19-20.

The conference "brings together executives from leading AI companies as well as large enterprises using AI with policymakers, scholars, ethicists and lawyers to consider in a holistic way the challenges facing the ethics and governance of AI, both for companies developing this revolutionary technology as well as the enterprises incorporating AI into their businesses," according to the event's website."

US government looks to expand scientific open access policy; Ars Technica, 12/14/09

John Timmer, Ars Technica; US government looks to expand scientific open access policy:

The US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy is hosting a forum for debating an expansion of an open access policy, used by the National Institute of Health, that guarantees all publications derived from the agency's funding are available to the public within one year.

"Last Thursday, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy launched a public forum to allow the public to provide feedback into a potential expansion of the US government's open access policy for scientific research. Right now, the National Institutes of Health is the only agency that requires recipients of its funding to make any scientific papers available to the public within a year of the publication date. For the next month, the OSTP will be soliciting feedback on whether and how the policy should be extended to other federal agencies...

One problem with the documents at the website is that they don't make a clear distinction between the publications that are based on research funded by federal agencies and the data behind the research itself. A more informative description of the different materials can be found in the Federal Register, which published the official request for input...

So, for the moment at least, the OSTP is focusing strictly on publications, and not on providing access to the raw data produced during the course of these studies (although that may be subject to separate disclosure policies, depending on the agency and material). It's a rather significant distinction to make, given the recent controversy over the availability of climate data that was used to produce several peer-reviewed studies.

In any case, the actual format of the material may ultimately be just as important as which agencies are included. The ability to ingest data from these publications and make it accessible to text mining and meta-analysis that crosses disciplines has the potential to open new avenues for research and provide a higher scientific return on the public's investment."

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/12/us-government-looks-to-expand-scientific-open-access-policy.ars