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With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

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Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#101

Post by markmark »

roywiggins wrote: post #74
zucker42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some differences that would probably affect things in court: 1. It's parody. Parody has specific statutory protection. 2. It's clearly labelled as speech synthesis. 3. It doesn't stand in for any of the original works. The market for deep fakes is much different than that for songs or presidential speeches.

Is it a parody as understood by the law, though? How is it parodying Jay-Z? It's definitely "for fun", but it's not clear that it's making fun of or commenting on Jay-Z. It's really not clear to me. This page cites a case where someone imitated Dr Seuss' literary voice and lost. https://www.cotmanip.com/articles/fair-use-parody

This is the point I was going to make. For a parody fair-use defence to be valid, you need to be parodying the thing you are infringing on, and as much as people always say "oh this is parody so it's clear fair use" by the accounts I've seen (such as Penny Arcade's Strawberry Shortcake comic) that can be a difficult defence to actually mount.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#103

Post by markmark »

Talanes wrote: post #97
dtech wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Weird Al's songs aren't parodies in the legal sense. "Party in the CIA" is just "Party in the USA" with different Lyrics, it's not protected, just like most covers aren't. "Smells like Nirvana" is, because it directly references and parodies how the singer in the song is barely understandable.

Where would White and Nerdy place? It's not a direct comment on the original artist, but it is intentionally playing with a reversal of the stereotypes associated with the original piece.

Only a court can decide that. Parody is a defence in a copyright infringement case when it comes down to it, which is why Weird Al just gets permission instead. There's a lot of uncertainty on the edges.

It's interesting to read about the trouble Penny Arcade had https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/04/25/strawberry-shortcake-...

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#104

Post by gnopgnip »

AlexanderNull wrote: post #15
css wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very important to note that the Midler case has very narrow interpretation. From the Opinion: > We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed…

Videos on YouTube are selling advertisements so wouldn't this apply here?

No. The video in question was not. And more generally just because an ad plays along side a video does not mean the video itself is a commercial work, in the same way a newspaper or magazine can have ads alongside editorial content.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#105

Post by xigency »

anitil wrote: post #59
throwaway_USD wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2015 I had an unusual solicitation from a recruiter on LinkedIn - as a lawyer this in my experience is a rarity unlike tech where I understand it to be common place - with interest in offering me a General Counsel position with Romero Britto's Company. Turns out Apple engaged in discussions to license (or maybe commissioning) Britto's Art, but then Apple turned around and essentially just "knocked off" of Britto's…

Out of interest, if someone contacts you in this manner, do you/they have an implicit attorney/client privilege? Or is it only after you come to an agreement to represent them? Or is it more of a rule of thumb?

Pop culture says that happens when the first dollar is handed over.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#106

Post by Reelin »

colechristensen wrote: post #71
Animats wrote: post #64

This was approached all wrong. The first highly publicized demos of singing generated like this should have been of dead people - Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Elvis. First, it's not clear who has the right to sue, and in what jurisdiction. Rights associated with those people have been transferred and resold enough times that there's no clear claimant. Second, many people have impersonated those voices, so there's a…

Deepfakes (a better term is needed) are by their nature derivative works, which copyright already handles with the original's owner retaining rights which have to be acquired. I have absolutely no problem with it. If you don't own the copyright to your entire training data set, you are infringing by publishing something the model produces as I see it. The courts or the legislature are going to have to address how you…

> If you don't own the copyright to your entire training data set, you are infringing by publishing something the model produces as I see it.

I suspect that would be an absolutely terrible standard in practice. I realize you specifically have deepfakes in mind, but consider that in more general terms those are outputs from a machine learning algorithm. Such outputs will inevitably fall on a continuum regarding the degree to which they resemble a distinctive art style, voice, personality, or other metric.

It seems unreasonable to me that it should be illegal to use arbitrary input data to train a NLP translation model or an image classifier. Farther along the spectrum of outputs, style transfer GANs don't seem like they should be a violation of the law. Should TWDNE really be against the law to host? (https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/) According to your proposed standard, it would be.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#107

Post by Reelin »

ineedasername wrote: post #76
em-bee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you see a new video with elvis presley today, you know it's not really him. the chances of mistaken identiy is low. if the person is still alive then people might believe it's an original and the impersonated can legitimately claim that the fake is profiting from that mistaken identity.

Mistaken identity doesn't come into play here. It's copyright that got the videos removed, not publicity rights.

The point is that copyright doesn't apply to someone's image or likeness - that's trademark! Copyright only applies to a work itself (at least in the US).

A deepfake Elvis video of a song that he didn't write would be subject to copyright by the original author of the song and to trademark by the owner of Elvis's likeness. However, it seems plausible that such a trademark claim might fail because (among other things) it should be apparent to a viewer that it isn't actually Elvis.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#108

Post by akersten »

crazygringo wrote: post #89

So if I understand this correctly... YouTube took these videos down based on a copyright (DMCA?) claim. Which of course isn't a court ruling or anything. At the same time, no court would ever uphold this removal, because it obviously falls under "parody" which is protected. (Otherwise shows like Saturday Night Live couldn't even exist.) After all, the end result is no different from a really good vocal impersonator.…

> I kind of feel like that's going to have to be the outcome at some point in the near future -- in fact, as soon as really convincing yet nasty deepfakes of senators and representatives start making the rounds and spreading on Facebook, I suspect a new law will get passed incredibly quickly.

Ugh, that is the type of free-speech infringement that people should be worried about, not all this stuff about how YouTube taking down videos is government censorship.

A really good deepfake is still fiction. Really good writing is fiction. Really poorly-written fake "news" blogs "reporting" lies as truth is fiction. These are all allowed to exist (in the USA) because of the 1st Amendment. It is the price that we pay for living in a free society, that the government cannot tell you "your fiction is not allowed."

Textual accounts of real events, and lies about real events, have existed for ages. Sometimes the lies are more convincing than the truth. Audio recording and doctored audio has existed for ages. Photography and doctored photos have existed for ages. Video recording and doctored video has existed for ages. We'll survive another flavor of doctoring just fine without the government's help.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#109

Post by jameslevy »

crazygringo wrote: post #89

So if I understand this correctly... YouTube took these videos down based on a copyright (DMCA?) claim. Which of course isn't a court ruling or anything. At the same time, no court would ever uphold this removal, because it obviously falls under "parody" which is protected. (Otherwise shows like Saturday Night Live couldn't even exist.) After all, the end result is no different from a really good vocal impersonator.…

Whether or not a deepfake is used for a parody is far less important than whether content using deepfakes identifies its artificial nature. Deepfake content masquerading as real content is actually dangerous and should be regulated as such.

But no, Jay-Z should not be able to take down parodies on YouTube that make it clear to the viewer that they are using deepfakes.

Re: With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube

#110

Post by Reelin »

jedimastert wrote: post #18

For my own edification, wouldn't trademark law be more applicable?

I'm quite puzzled as well. As far as I can tell (not a lawyer) copyright law shouldn't apply at all in this case. According to the article the actual works performed were an excerpt from Hamlet (public domain) and a song by Billy Joel (so someone likely has a valid copyright claim, but probably not Jay-Z).

On the other hand, it seems like it might well be an infringement of his likeness (ie a trademark violation). I'm not sure about the nuances surrounding trademark law though - does it have to make money, do intentions matter, how obvious does it need to be that this is an impersonation, etc.

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