Industry consultant Bob Samuel has been named executive producer of the newly formed Solution, a New York-headquartered creative resources management group which will offer representation and other services to companies on its roster. Samuel is in charge of day-to-day operations for Solution, which opens with two clients for national representation: Venice, Calif.-based visual effects house Sight Effects, and Hollywood-headquartered physical effects and set construction company Cinnabar.….Cathi Connor, Jim Waldron and Wendy Hanson of The Connor Group, Chicago, have been named to handle the Midwest for West Los Angeles-based Original Film….Don Stogo of Donald R. Stogo Associates (DRSA), New York, has signed an exclusive agreement with Zoom Film & Television, Sydney and Brisbane, Australia, to represent director/cameraman Mark Toia in the U.S. Additionally, DRSA will be exclusively repping director Dennis Hitchcock of Motion Picture Limited, Auckland, New Zealand, in the U.S…..Rachel Finn and Mary Saxon of FinnSaxon Represents, Santa Monica and San Francisco, respectively, have been named to cover the West Coast and Texas for Berkeley, Calif.-based sound design house Noises Digital, which features sound designer Kim Cristensen….London-based spot postproduction house Smoke & Mirrors has named Amanda Lowit its head of marketing, a newly created position at the company. She formerly served as head of television and a board director at Grey Worldwide, London….
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More