Midjourney – Testing the Boundaries of Art, AI and the Law

The recent advent of compelling new AI driven image generation services, including OpenAI’s Dal-EE and MidJourney is signalling a profound transformation in the creative economy. Over recent years, AI image generators have developed from interesting curiosities to the point that they can now mimic highly specialised human artistry, producing images that rival the technical quality of human illustrators or artists...

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Scanning the New Wave of Biometric Privacy Laws

Over the past year, a significant number of US states have passed new laws regulating the collection, use and monetisation of biometric identity. Known as Biometric Information Privacy Acts (BIPA) these acts set up a framework for companies to work in when they are collecting and using biometric data including facial and iris scans, fingerprints or voiceprints. The most prominent...

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UK Criminal Reforms Target Explicit Deepfakes

The Law Commission of England and Wales has released new recommendations on the expansion of laws regarding intimate image abuse, which would include the criminalisation of the distribution of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfake videos or images. The law expands the scope of current criminal laws which already cover the sharing of non-consensual taking and sharing of intimate images (including revenge...

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Clearview AI Reaches Settlement to Limit Distribution of Facial Recognition Software

The New York Times has reported that Clearview AI has reached a legal agreement to limit the availability of its AI facial recognition technology, that was built on a foundation of wide-scale data scraping and unauthorised use of personal information (PI). Clearview scraped publicly available images of individuals from social media sites to populate its AI, without obtaining consents from...

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Amazon ‘Virtual Laws’ Blamed For Bribery Scandal

Over the past two decades the extraordinary growth of Internet giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Alibaba, AirBnB, EBay and YouTube has been accompanied by the evolution of a complex network private legal systems designed to regulate the behaviour of users, vendors and customers, systems of Virtual Law that act in parallel with or occasionally at odds with national regulation. Virtual...

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Format Rights and Social Media

Formats are an important part of the media economy and one of the key tools used in the development and production of original programming around the world. Formats are the sum total of all of the distinct stylistic elements of a program – such as the title, characters, themes, style, scripts, staging elements and/or narrative structure. Successful formats are adapted...

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YouTube Copyright Strikes Out

The YouTube copyright enforcement program is a complex series of rules and technical processes that governs what can and can’t be uploaded onto the world’s largest single source of user generated content. Yet by imposing a uniform set of rules and dispute resolution procedures to enforce copyright globally, YouTube has created a defacto supranational legal system where the sheer size...

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Pokemon Go Shows Limits of AR Law

For the past few years, virtual reality (VR) has seized headlines and mindshare as it promises to transform your life with big budget flashy hardware like the Oculus Rift.  Meanwhile VR’s reclusive cousin, augmented reality (AR), which overlays digital graphics or data in real time over video, has been quietly worming its way into our lives in with functionality in Google Translate, Decolabs home design...

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Who Owns Your Face?

Biometric Personality in an era of Facial Recognition Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Speech Recognition Systems By Gordon Finlayson Facial features are essential to human identity, our unique set of facial features are the means with which we can instantly identify one another out of the billions of humans alive on the planet. Faces are essential to your understanding of your...

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