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Showing posts from April, 2025

Is AI Art Piracy? Your Favorite Media Giants Say Yes

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It's pretty clear that, when someone owns a copyright, they want to prevent their works from being copied. This includes any derivative works that aren't being made for a fair use purpose. Yet, how does this look when we add generative AI to the mix? Our laws don't have an answer for us yet. Nonetheless, courts have, and are in the middle of, responding to this controversy. The Times has reported that media conglomerates Disney and Universal Studios have filed a joint lawsuit against Midjourney, an AI image generation tool. Founded in 2021, the platform raked in $100 million in revenue last year through its subscription model. It relies on a massive dataset of media that isn't available for public scrutiny, making it questionable whether any data was sourced with the approval of the original copyright holders. It's this fear that has led many independent artists to "poison" their images with the hopes of tricking these generation tools into producing inc...
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Balancing the Scales: NFL Draft Day & Crafting the Contracts

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  This past weekend was the 2025 NFL Draft, taking place in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Although we have yet to see these rookies in action, many fans are already speculating how these players will perform in the upcoming NFL season.  Yet, the glitz & glamor doesn’t end at the big stage. The real magic happens at the negotiation table, when contracts need to be drafted by the players’ respective teams. In fact, numerous incentives, required provisions and back-and–forths are needed before their future stars sign the dotted line.   Let’s dissect what’s included as part of an NFL rookie contract. Source: https://www.nfl.com/draft/ Pre-Draft Conversations There is no requirement for any draft player to go with the team that selects them. If they reject their offer, they’ll go back into the draft pool - unless they are traded. They don’t have a say on which team they want, but discussions often happen weeks before the draft.  Teams and agents become aware of these...
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Stems Without Roots: The Inconsistency of Clearing Samples And How to Fix It

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In 2021, leading up to his fourth studio album, LP!, rapper JPEGMAFIA dropped “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” on YouTube with one, powerful line in the description: “couldn’t clear it. :(“ . Although this line was eventually removed upon the official Spotify release of the  track, these three words serve as the bane of independent music artists within hip-hop and beyond. Sampling takes a piece of one song to turn it into something new, and was considered a sign of respect when it was popularized in hip-hop, as stated by Sebastian Mahul. Unfortunately, copyright law disagrees - rather, it doesn’t mention anything remotely close to sampling, leaving it to the courts to fight over the issue for decades.   What needs to be done is to include sampling as a protected practice within copyright law. This would back up decades of culture surrounding the art, and allow for full-fledged creativity free of any restrictions. It would be a win for independent artists, and a win for the music landscape...
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