Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/22/tennessee-signs-elvis-act-into-law-protecting-musicians-from-deepfakes.html
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“Tennessee knows the value of musicians, as Memphis and Nashville are cities synonymous with country, blues and rap.”
As a native Memphian, I cannot help but observe that at least one music genre may have been inadvertantly omitted from the above sentence. (Hint: Sun Records).
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Ai creators will just claim their Elvis image is just Nick Cage impersonating Elvis impersonating Nick Cage impersonating Elvis.
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Is there any exception for parody? (Because that does seem like a legitimate use of the tech.)
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I think you’re being too generous, definitely more than one.
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I think this is the bill in question. It says the below on that matter:
(2) Revises the present law that provides that it is deemed a fair use and no violation of an individual’s rights shall be found, for purposes of this part, if the use of a name, photograph, or likeness is in connection with any news, public affairs, or sports broadcast or account. This amendment replaces the present law and, instead, provides that to the extent such use is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it is deemed a fair use and not a violation of an individual’s right if the use of a name, photograph, voice, or likeness is:
(A) In connection with any news, public affairs, or sports broadcast or account;
(B) For purposes of comment, criticism, scholarship, satire, or parody;
(C) A representation of the individual as the individual’s self in an audiovisual work unless the audiovisual work containing the use is intended to create, and does create, the false impression that the work is an authentic recording in which the individual participated;
(D) Fleeting or incidental; or
(E) In an advertisement or commercial announcement for a work described in this (2).
It seems…a trifle weird…that “sports” is lumped in with “news” and “public affairs” as a legitimate carve-out; when athlete publicity rights aren’t obviously less valuable than those of some other types of celebrities; and there’s a much weaker public interest case to be made; but it looks like fair use is considered, so long as it does not purport to be authentic tape.
It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if we see some bad-faith attacks on that basis of “the dumbest guy I know thinks the Colbert Report is actually a right wing talk show; therefore it’s perjurious hyper-fraud!” type arguments; but I’m not sure how else you could reasonably write the law without either forbidding parody entirely or making any deception that the perpetration claims to have been joking about legal.
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I’m assuming this is all part of the original legislation being amended to include AI impersonations, and if we’re talking about athletes being depicted within the context of sporting events, it makes sense. (Pictures of the athletes in question are going to be shown in line-up/stats images, etc.) The whole section becomes very weird in the context of AI impersonations, though. The sports bit might be the only one that seems at all reasonable in that context, as AI reconstructions of events not cleanly recorded by cameras (from particular angles, etc.) could conceivably have a role in sports coverage.
I would think that a slight extension of that very possibility is why you would want to slam the door shut on the exemption for sports: presumably the existing broadcaster would be in the easiest position to just do a little touch-up at first; but, in principle, it would be wholly allowed to skip the broadcast rights entirely if you can devise a way to machine-vision player and ball movement out and then animate player models appropriately(I suspect that would not yet be practical in real time or without a bit of handholding from someone with motion capture and animation experience; though the output of even console-tier sports game engines is definitely getting into the realm of ‘near photorealism, if you aren’t too close to the TV’).
That would be an R&D project; but with US sports broadcast rights costing north of $20 billion/year it would be a tempting one.
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It’s already a copyright violation to claim to be someone - but sounding like them without claiming to be them is not a copyright violation.
I’m pretty sure as long as it “A song title in the style of Elvis” there isn’t much this law or anyone could do even if it’s AI.
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Skimming the image in the post, are politicians considered artists?
Well, maybe con artists. 
It would be the high-tech version of what happened in the radio days, when broadcasters would get the basic information of what was happening in a baseball game and then announcers would recreate the game from those basic stats and act out the game as if they were seeing it themselves…
I’m guessing that would be a loophole that would get closed pretty quick when they got to that point.
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That seems likely, it’s not like the major sports cartels have a history of haplessness in terms of getting the legislation they require; whether it be gouging stadiums out of municipal budgets or antitrust exemptions out of congress; it just seems weird that they’d open themselves up to it in the first place.
I suspect that the process of ingesting a game to be reproduced by simulated models is currently the hard part(both in number of people you’d need manually papering over gaps and number of hours behind the broadcast partner who just gets to use cameras you’d be); but in a context where major broadcasters are shelling out a couple of billion dollars a year each, and some events are exclusives, the temptation to work on producing laundered versions seems fairly evident; and league concern about potentially competing with those versions seems like it would also be pretty plausible.
Even without any developments in synthetic games sports broadcast fees have been running into issues with really aggressive bundling forced on the disinterested causing dissatisfaction with cable bills(ESPN, in particular, seems to get called out for being particularly expensive to carry and particularly insistent about being carried); and some really punchy sticker shock if you try to cover the relevant broadcast fees purely on the backs of people who do care with the various sports streaming packages.
I don’t sympathize; the apparatus that has grown up around pro and commercialized college sports seems like a cancer whose commercial viability is unfortunate; but I wouldn’t expect the people who it works out very well for to go quietly into a future where people who want sports just play at the cheap 'n recreational level and people who want to spectate can get highly plausible imitations for a relative pittance.
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Trump once drew on a hurricane map, but I’m not sure it really should be considered art. It definitely didn’t rise to the level of “doctored” the way news stories called it though.
Picture of the doctor in question
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