I don’t think that’s the kind of watermark being talked about here, Kol. NIST is being called on to develop, quoted from the COPIED ACT Summary, watermarking and content provenance information. I believe we’re talking about the unseen, math-y, certification and (I imagine) cryptography kind of digital watermark, not the crappy visual edits made by iFunny and co.
In fact, since it also says:
Prohibits removing, altering, tampering with, or disabling content provenance information, with a limited exception for security research purposes.
The content in question might reach e.g. iFunny already “signed” and they wouldn’t be able to remove that.
Of course, I’m saying this without actually fully understanding what covered content (digital representations of copyrighted works) means. Does my OC on deviantart count as covered content? I think so, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. If anyone could help me understand this, please, that’d be really nice.
And finally, as was already said by others, I think this does nothing for all the crap companies already did to artists, since the law can’t affect them retroactively. Not that cool for small artists, since they’ll still be abused, except big tech would have the legal monopoly on abuse.
I mean no disrespect by this, did you read the article?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Disney won’t sell licenses.
They’ll keep their monopoly on 95% of the training data on the market for entertainment content.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I am not understanding. They will now be even more effective at what they do and will be building a tech stack that no one else has access to and you think this is a win for the little guy?
If you owned a store, then a Walmart setup next to it and Walmart rolled out some new barcode system that your scanners didn’t work on how the hell would that benefit you?
Not only are the already bigger, they are getting efficiencies they aren’t sharing with your business. You want open protocols, you want tool sharing, you want the market as a whole to be getting more efficient. You don’t want some company that already won able to pulverize by sheer size anyone who competes.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
No, it’s very obviously not a win for the little guy.
If you can’t learn from public performances, art dies. That’s all of art for thousands of years.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 2 months ago
Nah. They will cross licence with the other big players effectively closing the market to anyone they don’t bless.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
They already own all the big players.