A bill to protect performers from unauthorized AI heads to California governor; NPR, August 30, 2024

Mandalit del Barco, NPR; A bill to protect performers from unauthorized AI heads to California governor

"Other proposed guardrails

In addition to AB2602, the performer’s union is backing California bill AB 1836 to protect deceased performers’ intellectual property from digital replicas.

On a national level, entertainment industry stakeholders, from SAG-AFTRA to The Recording Academy and the MPA, and others are supporting The “NO FAKES Act” (the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act) introduced in the Senate. That law would make creating a digital replica of any American illegal.

Around the country, legislators have proposed hundreds of laws to regulate AI more generally. For example, California lawmakers recently passed the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB 1047), which regulates AI models such as ChatGPT.

“It's vital and it's incredibly urgent because legislation, as we know, takes time, but technology matures exponentially. So we're going to be constantly fighting the battle to stay ahead of this,” said voice performer Zeke Alton, a member of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee. “If we don't get to know what's real and what's fake, that is starting to pick away at the foundations of democracy.”

Alton says in the fight for AI protections of digital doubles, Hollywood performers have been the canary in the coal mine. “We are having this open conversation in the public about generative AI and it and using it to replace the worker instead of having the worker use it as a tool for their own efficiency,” he said. “But it's coming for every other industry, every other worker. That's how big this sea change in technology is. So what happens here is going to reverberate.”"

The Ed Sheeran lawsuit is a threat to Western civilization. Really.; The Washington Post, May 2, 2023

 Elizabeth Nelson, The Washington Post; The Ed Sheeran lawsuit is a threat to Western civilization. Really.

"Imagine a painter in their studio, preparing for an exhibition. The painter is working on a landscape. The sky is midnight blue. The valley is Kelly green. Mountains loom in the back, a spectacular hue reflecting off a brilliant sunset. The painter reaches for vermillion and then pauses. Wait a second, they think: Does someone own the copyright to this shade of red? Am I going to get sued for this?

That would be crazy, right? Regrettably and amazingly, in the music industry the aesthetic equivalent of this thought process is no longer as insane as it sounds."

Exclusive: German authors, performers call for tougher ChatGPT rules amid copyright concerns; Reuters, April 19, 2023

Foo Yun Chee, Reuters;  Exclusive: German authors, performers call for tougher ChatGPT rules amid copyright concerns

"Forty-two German associations and trade unions representing more than 140,000 authors and performers on Wednesday urged the European Union to beef up draft artificial intelligence rules as they singled out the threat to their copyright from ChatGPT...

"The unauthorised usage of protected training material, its non-transparent processing, and the foreseeable substitution of the sources by the output of generative AI raise fundamental questions of accountability, liability and remuneration, which need to be addressed before irreversible harm occurs," the letter seen by Reuters said."

Sirius’s Move to Bypass a Royalty Payment Clearinghouse Causes an Uproar; New York Times, 11/6/11

Ben Sisario, New York Times; Sirius’s Move to Bypass a Royalty Payment Clearinghouse Causes an Uproar:

"SoundExchange, a nonprofit group, was founded in 2000 and is authorized by the United States Copyright Office to collect one kind of royalty for digital music. The royalty, the performance right for sound recordings, pays performers and record companies when their songs are played on digital streams like satellite radio and Pandora. (In a rule that has annoyed record companies and musicians for decades, terrestrial radio pays only songwriters and publishers.)"