Generative AI (GenAI) has become increasingly integrated into marketing and communication careers, and even our daily lives, with the rise of various text-to-image, text-to-video, & text-to-text tools. As digital marketers find new and innovative ways to keep up with the trends, and specifically GenZ in a quick-changing popular culture scene, how are they reacting to the rise of GenAI?
Arts and cultural organizations are becoming increasingly aware of their climate impact, and many are taking action to reduce harm. Tracking, reporting, and offsetting emissions may seem like an overwhelming feat for small or mid-sized organizations, but emerging blockchain technology may help make the process more efficient and reliable.
As previously foreshadowed by Samantha in an article written in July of 2023, TikTok: Opportunity and Risk, TikTok has been under a microscope from governments across the globe for quite awhile. The analysis provided in her article is still relevant today given the recent vote to ban TikTok, and the United States House moving forward to force Chinese state-owned TikTok company ByteDance to sell their ownership of the U.S. version of TikTok, or lose access to the United States TikTok market. To fully understand the situation, this article will recap TikTok’s controversial Privacy Policy and the 2023 testimonies, and also discuss the current governmental situation surrounding the ban.
Digital strategy has become a buzzword after the explosion of AI in the last 18 months. Yet, it is not about AI. AI has been the tipping point for organizations and professionals to recognize that they must update or create a digital strategy for success. Digitally-forward arts organizations already have a digital component as part of their strategic plan. Read more to understand the need for technology to be a core component of strategic plans and operations.
This month, the United States federal government is placing increased scrutiny on big tech regarding privacy, security, and market competition. While the Department of Justice files an antitrust suit against Apple for its hold on the smartphone market, Congress makes a bold statement with legislation potentially banning TikTok in the U.S.. Meanwhile, Reddit’s initial public offering may signal a move for tech companies to go public. In the world of entertainment, innovative tech brings scent to the gaming experience, and artists explore blockchain to compete with music streaming platforms.
On Monday, the headlines were ablaze with President Biden’s executive order addressing safe, secure, and trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. At 111 pages, the order offers a breadth of policy frameworks and standards creation that affect government operations and industry reporting. However, several areas of note have a direct potential impact on the work of artists and arts organizations: Watermarks of content authenticity, Copyright, and Labor.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have gained massive popularity in recent years, touching industries from fashion to video games. NFTs occupy a unique space under copyright law, but are subject to the basic rules other art forms are. The law protecting digital assets, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), was passed in 1998 before NFTs were prevalent. The DMCA allows any artist to request a work be taken down if it is something they have ownership over and did not authorize its publication. This extends to artists with any ownership stake, whether they are a singer-songwriter with sole ownership over a song, or a whole team of writers and producers. While NFTs have the potential to benefit musicians, the music industry has fallen victim to the copyright issues NFTs present. Music industry professionals should understand the vulnerability of their work and consider monitoring NFT marketplaces to get ahead of being victims of copyright infringement.
There is ongoing legal debate around Quentin Tarantino's latest project, an exclusive behind-the-scenes NFT collection based on the 1994 Miramax blockbuster hit "Pulp Fiction," published in December 2021 on Opensea by SCRT Labs. A California lawsuit will determine whether Tarantino's plan is too cavalier, and whether Miramax should receive a cut of the sale. Today’s NFT world is governed by crude and antiquated laws surrounding copyright and trademark ownership. Hopefully this lawsuit establishes new legal boundaries and guidelines for future cases. In the meantime, NFT collectors should stay wary of ambiguous claims and unclear terms.
In early 2021, the $69M sale of Everydays – The First 100 days, by Beeple, sprung NFTs from a niche but growing section of the digital art world into the mainstream public consciousness. Google searches for NFTs skyrocketed. Saturday Night Live spoofed the rapid sector growth with a parody of Emenim’s “Without Me” entitled “What the Hell’s an NFT.” A 10 second clip of the sketch was subsequently turned into an NFT which sold for $365,000. As pop culture awoke to and embraced this facet of the digital art world, so too has the urgency for artists, museums, and collectors to understand the rapidly evolving legal considerations within the NFT space.
In our technology-stuffed world, the difficulties faced by video artists seem paradoxical. Due to high up-front costs, and the difficulty of handling and selling digital technologies, established institutions such as art galleries and museums often shun their work. Artists may look at the entertainment industry as an alternative, but find themselves unfulfilled, as musicians typically come first in these sorts of collaborations.
This Wednesday, 1/18/2012, Wikipedia, Reddit , and Boing Boing will go dark in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act that is being considered in US House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act in the US Senate. These protesters are asking for the US public to call or write to their elected officials regarding the proposed legislation. Bloggers in this forum have taken a stance against limiting open source and net neutrality in the past and these two bills pose no less of a threat to the innovative culture that is open source.
Although there has been a healthy open source community for decades, legislation like SOPA or PIPA would exclude open source software opportunities to developers in the US if passed. These bills would essentially lock down portions of the internet to users in the US by creating a federally kept blacklist of internet sites that internet service providers would in turn prevent from being served to their US customers. This would prevent the US public from accessing the steady stream of free content from the open source community that has been continuously redefining the online world for decades.
Open source has been the frontier of technological innovation for decades and by passing this legislation the US Congress will simply ensure that the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon simply never get off the ground from US soil. In celebration of Open Source a list has been compiled with some great open source alternatives to common commercial software packages that can be downloaded for free:
1) OpenOffice: Similar functionality to MS Suite with modules for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentation and drawing
2) Dia: Produces charts and flowcharts like MS Visio.
3) WordPress and Joomla: WYSIWYG web page builders that compare favorably with aspects of Adobe Dreamweaver.
4) paint.net: An image editing program with much of the some of the same functionalityof Photoshop.
5) Pidgin: A messaging aggregator, useful in communicating with all the disparate messaging programs out there.
*) Foxit: A pdf reader that won't bog down your system and won't update every six hours like Adobe Acrobat does.
“We Are More Often Treacherous Through Weakness Than Through Calculation.” -Francois De La Rochefoucauld
It is my intuitive belief that most theft of images happens online because it is really, really easy. Indeed, this isn’t the first and it won’t be the last article on the Internet about preventing people from stealing your visual images. The only real way of guaranteeing that no one steals the digital copies of your artwork is to not put it up. This, however, is n
ot necessarily a viable option for those interested in reaching an audience in the information age.
The following are a few simple ways to make it more difficult for others to copy your images.
1) Disable right click on images Code in commands to disable right click on images or <body oncontextmenu="return false;"> You will circumvent a good portion of casual illegal copying your images.
Pros: Easy, fast to implement Cons: Doesn’t block other common types of theft.
2) Digital watermarking Enter this term to any search engine for vendors who can help you acquire these services. They vary from simply imposing a subtle image onto your work once it is copied to embedded code that helps you track usage of your image whenever and wherever it is used.
Pros: You can embed visual trails back to your home website and boost your traffic, helps prevent people from passing off images (once they are stolen) as their own, and relatively fast to implement. Cons: The software will cost money and take time to implement. The watermarks are superimposed on your images and can detract from their impact.
3) Copy protection software Type ‘Copy Protection’ into your search engine and numerous software products will turn up for a variety of price points.
Pros: Copy protection software can be quite sophisticated and can dissuade a great majority of the population from coping your images. Cons: The software will cost money and take time to implement.
4) Adobe Flash Images in an Adobe Flash slide-show are much harder to copy.
Pros: You maintain quality, Flash is nifty Cons: Not everyone has Flash on their computer. People can still take screen shots. If you don’t know flash it will cost you money to implement through a designer.
Protecting intellectual property is also a matter of law and a serious one at that. For more information, legal information, please consult with a intellectual property attorney. Most states have pro-bono service organizations for artists. Simply enter in “lawyers for the arts <your state name>” into your search engine and you will be well on your way. For more general information about copyright law I would suggest you review a few more nifty articles about protecting your intellectual property.
(Photo: CC by Horia Varlan)
In response to CAMT's "Social Media, Video Footage and the Law" white paper, Lisa Niedermeyer from Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival contacted us with a related video about fair use as it relates to dance-related materials. As the white paper mentions, fair use can be a nebulous concept as far as what, how, and how much copyrighted material can be legally used. The video is a more detailed discussion of The Dance Heritage Coalition's published statement "Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-Related Materials". It features curators, archivists, documentary filmmakers, librarians and other collectors of dance-related materials discussing what they currently regard as reasonable application of the Copyright Act's fair use doctrine.
Technology in the Arts has just released a publication reviewing legal issues surrounding using video footage online. (Access the PDF publication here.)
Whether you are in marketing, development, education or operations, chances are that you will encounter some kind of contract or legal issue involving performance footage, either online or offline. This white paper serves as a survey of current industry trends and practices, as well as a guide to those exploring the ever-changing landscape of online media and the intellectual property and union issues associated with it. While nothing can replace the advice of a good lawyer on legal issues, this guide can alert you to potential problems while you are planning online media campaigns involving performance footage.
Do you have a story about issues you've had distributing performance footage online? Please share below.
