Colonialism has consistently been a force in the global purview, including the technological space. In recent years, the expansion of artificial intelligence has vastly increased corporations’ global influence. As the world’s technologies continue to advance and innovate, individuals must keep a watchful eye on the ways in which digital colonialism might repeat harmful practices from the past.
Due to the popularity and booming business of video games, Hollywood studios have capitalized on popular game titles by developing new content based off of their intellectual property (IP). This study sets out to better understand video game IP’s impact on film and television markets and what specific elements might impact an adaptation’s success.
Sustainability and AI were at the forefront this year at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Future of Museums Summit. What role will museums play in creating climate-friendly communities? And how can AI be used to maximize efficiency, increase accessibility, and deepen engagement? Read key conference takeaways from Xueer Ho and Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford.
An overemphasis on data-driven work within the nonprofit sector has been shown to result in cycles of disempowerment, driven by third-party data demands of funding bodies.. This compounds due to the many market orientations nonprofits need to adopt, particularly prevalent among the arts. A key to navigating these markets and funder requirements lies in identifying a specific data culture best fit for your organization and investing in resources and training in order to achieve that framework sustainably.
With AI’s ability to automatically produce content and process complicated datasets with high accuracy, museums worldwide are exploring ways in which this innovative technology can help them better achieve their missions and advance accessibility efforts. Through case studies, learn about three applications of this technology: content digitalization, language accessibility, and visual description.
As little as ten years ago, the capabilities of image generators were mere fantasy. Now, images can be made in seconds or minutes and children’s books can be generated in an hour, but how will this impact an industry where the art is at the forefront of consumers' minds? Comics, whether they be digital or print, have been heavily dependent on individual or small groups of artists to weave together stories. The ease of using AI to replicate that work may not be simple.
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.
