New bill stops content theft

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has proposed a new bipartisan bill, called ‘The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act’ (COPIED Act) which is designed to stop online content from being used for AI training, without consent or compensation.

Details of the COPIED Act

The new legislation–which was introduced by US Senators Maria Cantwell, Marsha Blackburn, and Martin Heinrich, who are the bill's main backers–focuses on stopping AI companies, like OpenAI, from using original content, created by journalists, writers, artists, and musicians, to train their AI models, without compensation or consent. AI companies will be required to provide content creators with the ability to attach machine-readable information to their work, which documents the origin and history of their work.

If passed, it’ll also make the removal or altering of digital watermarks illegal, giving creators the ability to sue companies if they feel they’ve been removed or tampered with, without their permission, and giving them control over how their work is used.

Why was the COPIED Act introduced?

This is the latest attempt, by Congress, to regulate AI and follows increasing outcries from artists and publishers groups about the unethical process of taking creators' work, without permission or proper compensation. Several groups including The Recording Academy, National Music Publishers’ Association, News/Media Alliance, National Newspaper Association, and SAG-AFTRA have endorsed the bill, claiming that:

“The capacity of AI to produce stunningly accurate digital representations of performers poses a real and present threat to the economic and reputational well-being and self-determination of our members. We need a fully transparent and accountable supply chain for generative Artificial Intelligence and the content it creates to protect everyone’s basic right to control the use of their face, voice, and persona.” – Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA