Hollywood-based production house PICROW has named Bill Reilly as executive producer. Reilly will bring over directors Zach Braff, Michael Haldane and Art Streiber from his own Brilliant Works company…LipSync Post has added VFX supervisor George Zwier and VFX producer Paul Driver. Zwier comes over from Double Negative where he has worked on feature film projects including Thor: The Dark World. During his career he has worked at such visual effects facilities as Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital, and his credits include the Dark Knight series, The Hobbit, Moulin Rouge, I, Robot, Children of Men, Inception and Pacific Rim. Zwier was the recipient of the 2010 Visual Effects Society’s accolade of “Best Compositing in a Motion Picture” for his work on Inception. Driver joins LipSync Post from Cinesite where he worked on 300: Rise of an Empire and Jack Ryan. Prior to this, he spent three years at Double Negative, where he was VFX line producer on Skyfall and assumed a similar role on John Carter of Mars. Driver also worked for five years at MPC on titles including The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Sweeney Todd. Current feature films at LipSync Post include A Little Chaos, directed by Alan Rickman; Turner, directed by Mike Leigh; Anomaly, directed by Noel Clarke; and television projects include BBC2’s Great Train Robbery films….Justin Ebert has been promoted from creative director to executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi NY. Ebert joined Saatchi as a creative director in Dec. 2010. During his Saatchi tenure, he has helped craft work for clients including MGD64, Keystone Light, Capri Sun, Kool Aid, Duracell and Charter Cable. Prior to Saatchi, Justin spent three years with Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colo., where he worked on Hulu, Microsoft, Best Buy, Volkswagen and American Express. During his career, Ebert’s work has garnered One Show Pencils, CLIOs, Cannes Lions, and been nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial….
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