It’s rather more than that. In the very least, it is a DRM system, meant to curtail fair use. We’re not just talking about AI training. The AutoTLDR bot here would also be affected. Manually copy/pasting articles while removing the metadata becomes illegal. Platforms have a legal duty to stop copyright infringement. In practice, they will probably have to use the metadata label to stop reposts and re-uploads of images and articles.

This bill was obviously written by lobbyists for major corpos like Adobe. This wants to make the C2PA standard legally binding. They have been working on this for the last couple years. OpenAI already uses it.

In the very least, this bill will entrench the monopolies of the corporations behind it; at the expense of the rights of ordinary people.

I don’t think it’ll stop there. Look at age verification laws in various red states and around the world. Once you have this system in place, it would be obvious to demand mandatory content warnings in the metadata. We’re not just talking about erotic images but also about articles on LGBTQ matters.

More control over the flow of information is the way we are going anyway. From age-verification to copyright enforcement, it’s all about making sure that only the right people can access certain information. Copyright used to be about what businesses can print a book. Now it’s about what you can do at home with your own computer. We’re moving in this dystopian direction, anyway, and this bill is a big step.

The bill talks about “provenance”. The ambition is literally a system to track where information comes from and how it is processed. If this was merely DRM, that would be bad enough. But this is an intentionally dystopian overreach.

EG you have cameras that automatically add the tracking data to all photos and then photoshop adds data about all post-processing. Obviously, this can’t be secure. (NB: This is real and not hypothetical. More)

The thing is, a door lock isn’t secure either. It takes seconds to break down a door, or to break a window instead. The secret ingredient is surveillance and punishment. Someone hears or sees something and calls the police. To make the ambition work, you need something at the hardware level in any device that can process and store data. You also need a lot of surveillance to crack down on people who deal in illegal hardware.

I’m afraid, this is not as crazy as it sounds. You may have heard about the recent “Chat Control” debate in the EU. That is a proposal, with a lot of support, that would let police scan the files on a phone to look for “child porn” (mind that this includes sexy selfies that 17-year-olds exchange with their friends). Mandatory watermarking, that let the government trace a photo to the camera and its owner, is mild by comparison.

The bill wants government agencies like DARPA to help in the development of better tracking systems. Nice for the corpos that they get some of that tax money. But it also creates a dynamic in the government that will make it much more likely that we continue on a dystopian path. For agencies, funding will be on the line; plus there are egos. Meanwhile, you still have the content industry lobbying for more control over its intellectual “property”.

This bill reads like it was written by Adobe.

This provenance labelling scheme already exists. Adobe was a major force behind it. (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Authenticity_Initiative ). This bill would make it so that further development will be tax-funded through organizations like DARPA.

Of course, they are also against fair use. They pay license fees for AI training. For them, it means more cash flow.

coffin

Hehe. I think you mean suitcase but this works, too.

covered content?

That is any digital representation of any copyrighted content. If it’s on DeviantArt, it is a digital representation. By creating something, you own the copyright. A notable exception is when you do the work for hire, in which case it probably belongs to your employer. (Or if the work lacks human creativity, in which case it is public domain.)

Anything on DeviantArt is almost certainly covered content, with the possible exception of AI generated images, or re-uploads of public domain content.

(5) COVERED CONTENT .—The term ‘‘covered content’’ means a digital representation, such as text, an image, or audio or video content, of any work of authorship described in section 102 of title 17, United States Code.

For reference: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

cool for small artists

It’s certainly very bad for small artists. Can I ask why you think it would be good?

To answer why it is bad for small artists: Money for license fees will mainly go to major content owners like Getty, or Disney. Small artists will have to go through platforms like Shutterstock or Adobe, which will keep most of the fees. At the same time, AI tools like generative fill are becoming ever more important. Such licensing regimes make artists’ tools more expensive. Major corporations will be able to extract more value.

Look at Adobe. It has a reputation for abusing its monopoly against small artists, right? Yet Adobe pays license fees for images on its platform, that it used for training its AI tools. Adobe has also created a provenance standard, such as this bill wants to make mandatory. This bill would make Adobe’s preferred business model the mandatory standard by law.

No. In the EU, the lobbyists have already won. Major countries, like Germany, have always had very conservative copyright laws. I believe it’s one reason why their cultures are losing so hard.

Surprisingly, Japan has adopted a very sensible law on AI training.

It’s all still there. No damage was done.

Don’t be a fool. Of course, content corporations like Disney or the NYT are able to prove just when something was made.

This is a brutally dystopian law. Forget the AI angle and turn on your brain.

Any information will get a label saying who owns it and what can be done with it. Tampering with these labels becomes a crime. This is the infrastructure for the complete control of the flow of all information.

The Russian reliance on terror tactics makes me wonder what lessons they took away from WW2. This is clearly part of a pattern; a military doctrine, that had already been applied during the fighting in Syria, if not earlier.

Not like this is the first time. It’s not even the second time.

The article lies about what’s in the bill. No idea why.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1047

What are they gonna do, send in a fucking swat team to take anything that doesn’t have hardware level DRM?

In a future where this is established, wouldn’t you expect non-compliant hardware to be treated just as drugs or machine guns are treated now?

I think that’s hardly an immediate worry, though. Various services already scan for illegal content or suspicious activity. It wouldn’t take much to get ISPs to snitch on their customers.

It’s steady pressure and it’s only in one direction. Some countries resist more than others. I’m guessing you are not in the EU, because if so, you’d be aware of the “chat control” push.

Even so, it’s not the days of Napster anymore. Think about hardware DRM. It stops no one but you, too, paid to have it developed and built into your devices. Think about Content ID. That’s not going away. It’s only going to be expanded. That frog will be boiled.

Recently, intellectual property has been reframed as being about “consensual use of data”. I think this is proving to be very effective. It’s no longer “piracy” or “theft”, it’s a violation of “consent”. The deepfake issue creates a direct link to sexual aggression. One bill in the US, that ostensibly targets deepfakes, would apply to any movie with a sex scene; making sharing it a federal felony.

Hey, I’m just saying how it’s going. Look at, say, threads here about deepfakes. See all the calls for laws and government action. How can that be enforced?

it would be if internet regulation was practically enforceable for anyone other than commercial businesses operating out in the open.

Well, then I guess we just have to call for more government enforcement.

In the EU, there is certainly more government pressure, instead of just lawsuits between big (or small) players.

I just described what’s going on. The world outside of China or Russia is going slower but the direction is the same.

Borders in cyberspace is the future. There are increased efforts to regulate the internet everywhere. Think copyright, age verification, the GDPR, or even anti-CSAM laws. It’s all about making sure that information is only available to people who are permitted to access it. China is really leading the way here.

We do not agree with China’s regulations, but that only means that we need border controls. Data must be checked for regulatory compliance with local laws.

Yes, she said that. But what she said there just doesn’t make any sense.

I thought she made some very good points, but the quote in the title makes no sense to me.