This morning I received various notices informing me that I had uploaded and used a handful of images without permission. This was done 3-15 years ago. The notices also state that, even after I delete them, I owe financial damages for their use. I’ve since deleted everything on this website except a few images.
The internet has changed quite a bit since 1995 when I first logged onto AOL using my dad’s Windows 3.1 laptop with a 14.4 baud modem. It was exciting. In 2000 my buddy who created Direct Connect (and hosted my website on neo-modus.com) started seeing legal issues on the horizon due to users sharing pirated videos. Housewives began getting sued for millions for sharing songs on Napster.
If you had a private website or forum, you were hacked relentlessly. My site The Stunt People and its associated forum required constant updates, since they were hosted on a private server. A good friend in Argentina helped me maintain these and I stay in touch with him to this day. But eventually the hacking was so severe I had to close the forum and migrate the website to WordPress, where it resides to this day.
Many others faced these realities. Social media platforms like Xanga, MySpace, and then Facebook were like Cities of Refuge which provided a buffer between the user and hackers and lawyers. YouTube created an innovative system which allows monetization while not allowing legal firms from extracting money from you.
At least, not yet.
Nobody wants their art stolen, but it happens all the time. What’s the fine line between imitation and plagiarism? Lawyers tend to decide this. I’m concerned AI will start deciding this.
In the USA you can copyright choreography, to some reasonable degree anyway. You can’t copyright a punch, but you might be able to copyright a combo, more likely you can copyright a fight scene. Someone might rip off your choreography. But how do you find who’s ripping off your stuff? If you could find them, you could technically sue them.
AI allows for some interesting and frightening possibilities for copyright holders. Let’s say you’re obsessed with a fight scene from a Reacher episode. Somebody or some entity owns that choreography. Maybe that choreography includes facial movements and subtle gestures that you don’t even notice. Without your knowledge, these “moves” are subconsciously being loaded into your mirror neuron system, where they’re subsumed into what I call the Internal Motor Representation (IMR) stack. These affect all IMR layers above this layer. Hence you become “inspired” by something which you can’t even remember.
Now let’s say you go and make an action scene. You think your action scene is novel, but you’ve subconsciously integrated the facial gestures and other nuances from Reacher into your scene. You upload it to YouTube and get millions of views and a lot of money.
As the Reacher copyright holder, I have a lot of money. I buy a ChatGPT server farm running my own instance and create an AI algorithm which creates a “pattern map” of the entire “choreography” of the show, including every facial gesture, finger flick, neck kink, etc. I then run the same algorithm against all new short films on YouTube with tags like “Reacher fan” or “tactical.” I find that your video matches the “pattern map” of a Reacher fight scene. I come up with a dozen of these. I then hire an AI legal firm which estimates your ad revenue from the video and sue you for that amount times some multiplier depending on how closely you matched my “pattern map.” Now I have a case against you.
Right now, YouTube would simply tell you you’re in copyright violation because you did gestures 2, 4, 16 and 38 in your fan film. You are demonitized, or perhaps you get a strike.
If I’m a major studio, I might make a case to YouTube that I deserve the right to prosecute these cases outside of YouTube. If YouTube disagrees with my case, I might threaten to leave the platform. If I can get 7 other studios on my side, I can get the major ad platforms on my side too. Then, YouTube will listen. YouTube will change their policy. And now you can and will be sued. You will have no idea how to defend this case because the prosecutor is an AI bot. Perhaps the legal system is using AI bots too. At that point, just settle and never use the platform again.
You and I are not YouTube’s clients. Their clients are ad companies. Their biggest content providers are studios. You and I, we are leeches. We don’t make them any money. If you are using YouTube, you will abide by their algorithm. When it changes, you will change your behavior. What it tells you to do, you will do.
However, I am WordPress’s client. I pay them money, and yet my blog gets attacked by these algorithms to extract rents from posts 15 years ago. I’ve heard they will also use the wayback machine to find past violations. You owe money, even if the picture is gone. I would like to see a system in place where WordPress could offer some support here. Otherwise, I need to move to a different platform.
I don’t know how much longer I can be in the indie scene. I am under the umbrella of my corporation now and I tend to just stay under there, with the exception of this blog, some Action Essays, and the Action Talks episodes. I don’t know how much longer I can do these safely, not independently anyway.
We’re quickly moving into a world where people no longer hold each other accountable through kinship networks, local institutions, or simply by living in physical proximity to one another. I have 2 neighbors on either side of me and one across the street from where I live who won’t even make eye contact with me. All accountability has already been outsourced to an impersonal legal system which is willing to sue housewives for millions, and now that’s being outsourced to AI.
I’m not even confident that opinions will be legally protected in the near future because AI can track all those and fine people however it needs. We might all rail against wokism or toxic masculinity, but those are really the least of our problems. The issue is that we’ve sold everything to these algorithms and they can be woke, toxic, Nazi, Hindu nationalist, or whatever they need to be to suit the current agenda. That agenda will probably change over time, but all it’s forms will share one common theme: a transition toward total corporo-lineal descent, perhaps even the elimination and punishment of all offline networks.