World News

An academic study to help content creators create more effective watermarks. This is the intention behind Google's creation of an algorithm based on artificial intelligence that shows how easy it is to remove watermarks from images. A study that offers important food for thought on how much impact machine learning algorithms can have on highly creative content.

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People write history. A war does not only victimize people, but also the history they have written (^SZ). UNESCO also takes a stand on the war in Europe, pointing out the need to reinforce protective measures for cultural heritage. Ukraine is home to seven sites protected by UNESCO as cultural heritage sites with the intention of placing them under the 'Blue Shield' under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict to prevent deliberate or accidental damage.

The debate on copyright and artificial intelligence is an ongoing battle. The US Copyright Office has yet again rejected an appeal against an attempt to register a work generated by a "creative machine" based on a machine learning algorithm. The office's appeal is that works must be "the product of intellect and creativity", which today cannot be attributed to a machine or software. Considering the current state of AI depends on enormous amounts of information that feed the 'knowledge' of the algorithm itself, it is reasonable to state that the result of the creativity of these systems is statistical or mathematical, and not creative. According to a statement made by an Australian judge, however, works of this kind could instead be subject to patenting.

Being a content creator today is becoming an increasingly sensitive issue. A YouTube user with 20,000 subscribers on his channel, and around 2,000 on Twitch, faced a copyright violation when his video was uploaded to Google's platform: a few minutes' test to see how his new microphone worked. ContentID, YouTube's infringement management platform, intervened without blowback and associated the monetization track with another figure.

Brexit will allow the UK to avoid implementing the EU directive on copyright. This means, there will be neither Link Tax nor Upload Filters coming anytime soon. But is it all that good?

When you touch a segment of the market that is worth tens of billions of dollars a year (2021), three things are inevitable, in this order: hype and enthusiasm for the novelty, fraud and theft, and legal consequences. As OpenSea has experienced several problems in recent weeks, Cent - the platform that sold Jack Dorsey's first Tweet in the form of NFT - has blocked most transactions due to the amount of fraud and scams being perpetrated through its system. The UK government also recently seized 3 NFTs (for the first time) worth GBP 1.4 million.

Created to compete with SoundCloud after reports of infringement on the platform intensified, Audius is banking on technology: publishing a catalogue that cannot be deleted because it resides on Blockhcain, a digital registry from which data cannot be deleted. But what happens if the music is infringing someone's rights? According to the platform's founders, they are not capable of removing the infringing track, making the problem worse.

It happened to a YouTube user who, before even being able to do his live broadcast, found himself being banned by the platform for infringement of copyright on behalf of Warner Bros. A ban that includes the suspension of his live broadcasts for three months, not generated by an algorithm, not due to an error, but by a user who manually entered the report on behalf of the manufacturer.

The subject of intellectual property is complex and 'NFT' or 'blockchain' are not the answer. Thus, every day there are striking cases such as DAO Spice winning a copy of the book Dune for over USD 3 million - but not the rights, artists reporting unauthorised uses of their works on NFT platforms or brands such as Nike or Hermes filing lawsuits against portals or platforms that are high-tech but poorly prepared on the subject.

Remarkably, we are entering an era where almost all music consumed is paid for, thanks to streaming services. The music industry is one of the segments where the value of copyrighted material can be perceived. UK investment firm Hipgnosis demonstrates this by investing USD 1 billion in music catalogue rights.

Want to repair something you own? As devices and vehicles have more and more embedded software, the DIY principle of repairing them becomes an issue of copyright infringement.

What would happen to Copyright if someone created any possible melody and release it to the Public Domain? This is what two musician/programmers are doing using AI to create as much as 300K melodies per second and therefore avoiding copyright strikes.

The more AI goes on, the more credit it's being given to its alleged creativity. Which, so far, has been something that could be attributed only to humans. But as more AI generated content is being created, who should own the copyright of it?

The subject of online copyright management is divided between difficulties and attempts to avoid problems. In this attempt, the search engine tycoon removes tens of thousands of links from its search results on the basis of bogus copyright infringement reports.

The mad race for innovation and NFTs is back in the news. It seems that HitPiece, a platform still in beta, created its own database of 'all the music in the world' using Spotify, before converting each unique track into an NFT. The reaction of copyright holders was promptly noticed and the platform was taken offline pending a decision. The situation around the NFT phenomenon and related fraud continues to cause talk and create confusion and distrust in what could only partly be a support for content creators. Protecting one's work before making it public is always one of the most recommended practices to be able to cope with problems that may arise in the future.