Regular Music Ally readers will know we enjoy a good (or tortuously-shoehorned) acronymic piece of legislation in the US.
So we salute senators Marsha Blackburn, Chris Coons, Thom Tillis and Amy Klobuchar for coming up with the name of the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act.
NO FAKES, geddit? A proposed bill that would “protect the voice and visual likenesses of individuals from unfair use through generative artificial intelligence”.
Specifically it would “prevent a person from producing or distributing an unauthorized AI-generated replica of an individual to perform in an audiovisual or sound recording without the consent of the individual being replicated”.
If they do it, they would be “liable for the damages caused by the AI-generated fake”. Oh, and platforms would also be held liable for hosting these unauthorised replicas “if the
platform has knowledge of the fact that the replica was not authorized by the individual depicted”.
That would thus apply to Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and all the other services where deepfakes have been distributed in recent times. The senators specifically cited Drake / The Weeknd deepfake ‘Heart On My Sleeve’ in their announcement of the bill.
The bill would carve out exceptions including deepfakes used “for purposes of comment, criticism, or parody” under the First Amendment. For now, this is a “discussion draft” for the senators’ fellow politicians to chew over.
The bill’s announcement isn’t a surprise. We wrote about the plans last month, after Ted Kalo of the Human Artistry campaign trailed them during a speech at an Ivors Academy conference in London.
“I expect in a matter of days or weeks that very prominent lawmakers, on a bipartisan basis, will be introducing a federal right of publicity,” said Kalo then.
That’s a key point to understand. There is already such a right (and thus the protections referred to in the No Fakes Act) in certain US states. But not across the whole country, which is what the bill would change.
“This will be a federal law that creates a uniform system across the board. And this is not a label’s right. This is not a publisher’s right. This is an artist’s right, that belongs to an artist, that they can assert,” said Kalo in his prediction. From the text of the bill, this is correct.
The bill was welcomed by US labels body the RIAA yesterday. “Our industry has long embraced technology and innovation, including AI, but many of the recent generative AI models infringe on rights – essentially instruments of theft rather than constructive tools aiding human creativity,” it said in a statement.
“We applaud Senators Coons, Blackburn, Tillis, and Klobuchar for recognizing that unauthorized uses of one’s name, image, likeness, and voice are a clear threat to artists, songwriters, performers, authors, journalists, photographers, and the entire creative community.”
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