Today's news and jokes

Did AMC get scammed into buying way too many jalapenos or something pic.twitter.com/zeDV9N49Q2

— ben (@ben4benis) February 2, 2025

An influencer sued another content creator for allegedly duplicating her TikTok, Instagram and Amazon Storefront posts

Everything from using the same "neutral, beige and cream aesthetics"  to posting "nearly identical videos"

Comic book artist with an already shaky reputation apparently caught using AI to create a new DC Comics cover

A look at his long history of swipes and worse.

Libraries have to pay an insulting premium to provide digital files

NPR:

[Seattle Public Library's collection services manager] pointed to Brittney Spears’ 2023 memoir "The Woman In Me" as a prime example of the budget challenges that e-books pose. [SPL] paid the book’s publisher $17.81 for each physical copy it bought, a few dollars cheaper than what an individual would pay in a bookstore.

Electronic copies were a totally different story. The e-book and e-audiobook are about $17 for a consumer, but the library paid more than three times that price: $64.99 for an e-book and $59.99 for a digital audiobook.

...

That price tag is only the start of the story. Publishers largely don’t allow libraries to own digital books outright — they have to license them for a set period of time or a set number of checkouts.

In the case of "The Woman In Me," each copy is only rented to the library for two years, then they have to pay again to keep using it. 

Author granted partial copyright in book written with ChatGPT

Wired:

The [US Copyright Office]’s notice granting [the human author] copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.

(The activist author is also famous for other reasons.)

The Getty Museum announced nearly 88,000 images of artworks from its collection are now available for free download on its Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero

Getty:

Users can download, edit, and repurpose high resolution images of their favorite Getty artworks without any legal restrictions. Add a print of your favorite Dutch still life to your gallery wall or create a shower curtain using the Irises by Van Gogh—the possibilities are endless.

Coyote vs Acme tattoo

I literally bled for this movie! So proud of what everyone on the team achieved. We put in the work. It deserves to be seen. Let’s all join @bauzilla in screaming #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme !!!! #AnnieAwards pic.twitter.com/NVnMgpqnPM

— Carsten Kurpanek (@Kurpanek) February 18, 2024

Clever advertisement designed to sneakily capitalize on the Super Bowl, and a certain celebrity fan

Tagging some of the geniuses behind the magic starting with the agency @meetprompt the creative leads @CraigElimeliah @AppleXenos and Cetaphil (@galderma) @tara_loftis @casscovaleski and I am sure many others that I cannot find. Exceptional work. Congratulations.

— Guillaume Huin (@HuinGuillaume) February 9, 2024

TIL there's a well-reviewed unauthorized novel in the Narnia series

(Mentioned in Robin Sloan's newsletter.) From 2019, 

Francis Spufford has taken a break from writing award-winning adult literature to fill in the details of what exactly went on in Narnia before The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. But he isn’t expecting his novel, set in CS Lewis’s magical world, to be published any time soon.

Spufford, who has been writing for the past three and a half years without the permission of the Lewis estate, began Narnia story The Stone Table on a family holiday to entertain his daughter Theodora.

...

The much-loved world of Aslan is under copyright until 2034. After finishing the novel, Spufford made a “tentative” approach to ask the Lewis estate if they might agree to publication, but did not receive a reply. Eventually he printed up 75 copies and started giving them to friends.

Last March:

For legal reasons, all I can say is: watch this space. Possibly for the next 11 years.

Joe Hill:

I read a great one last week: The Stone Table by Francis Spufford. 

Slate:

This is, in short, the perfect time to devour one more Chronicle of Narnia, a book that so uncannily captures the tone and flavor of the original seven that it’s only fitting Spufford has printed it up with the same interior design and even bound it in a fabric very similar to the binding of the hardcover copies I bought with my saved-up allowance and birthday money. 

From what I could tell, some excerpts were briefly posted, but even those are unavailable online.

Today at 6.30pm I will tweet Chaoter Two of Francis Spufford’s brilliant Narnia book The Stone Table pic.twitter.com/LoG6iHqM8E

— Frank Cottrell-Boyce (@frankcottrell_b) March 16, 2019

Japan failed to register newly-designed fruit, and thus can't stop China and South Korea from selling cheap knockoffs

AFP:

The variety of juicy grape ... took scientists 33 years to develop and can sell for $100 a bunch in Tokyo department stores.

...

According to the Japanese government, China and South Korea took Shine Muscat seedlings out of Japan and grafted them onto local vines to produce fruit that looks and tastes -- almost -- as good.

...

Japan cannot stop China or South Korea from growing the fruit because Tokyo -- some say naively -- failed to register the variety overseas within the six years required under international rules.

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Japan cannot export grapes to China itself because of Beijing's quarantine rules, so Chinese growers are not technically cannibalising Japanese sales.

A snippet of silly music was posted, listen while you can

Had a lot of fun scoring Coyote Vs Acme. As no-one will be able to hear it now, due to bizarre anti-art studio financial shenanigans I will never understand, here is a bit of behind the scenes footage of our “Meep Meep” Roadrunner choir, with apologies to Tchaikovsky… pic.twitter.com/HL7h00rXpp

— Steven Price (@SteveBPrice) November 10, 2023

A behind the scenes video was just uploaded, watch while you can

"A Trademark Dispute Is Tearing the Tiny Film Photography Community Apart"

Can you trademark "800T" when "800T" describes the fact that the film is 800 ISO, tungsten-balanced film? A deep dive from 404 Media, which cranks out interesting stories.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Grain Film (@thegrainfilm)

Today's news and jokes

Going to keep posting about my Wes Anderson-directed hotel in Bangkok until morale improves https://t.co/bBeNDEjEGc pic.twitter.com/aZPR4SKh8j

— Ben Mauk (@benmauk) September 17, 2023

Cory Doctorow wrote about Bill Willingham's Fables announcement

From a long essay:

it's also muddy. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can't reproduce the existing comics. That's not surprising; while Willingham doesn't say so, it's vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is also a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who's-who of comics greats for Fables). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn't have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books.

...

When Willingham says he's releasing Fables into the public domain, it's not clear what he's releasing – and what is his to release. In the colloquial, business sense of "IP," saying you're "releasing the IP" means something like, "Feel free to create adaptations from this." But these adaptations probably can't draw too closely on the artwork, or the logos. You can probably make novelizations of the comics. Maybe you can make new comics that use the same scripts but different art. You can probably make sequels to, or spinoffs of, the existing comics, provided you come up with your own character designs.

...

So maybe Willingham should create his own bespoke license for Fables. That may be what he has to do, in fact. But boy is that a fraught business. Remember the army of top-notch lawyers who created the CC licenses? They missed a crucial bug in the first three versions of the license, and billions of works have been licensed under those earlier versions. This has enabled a mob of crooked copyleft trolls

Bill Willingham says he's putting Fables into the public domain

He explains at length here. Brief write-ups by the Beat and Bleeding Cool.

John Blanche discusses some his most iconic paintings (and laments that the primarchs were ever turned into miniatures)

(I'm glad/relieved I've never seen his painted miniatures for sale, would probably be strongly tempted to spend an unreasonable amount of money.)

"Scientologists Ask Federal Government to Restrict Right to Repair"

404 Media:

The letter doesn’t refer to any single device, but experts say the petition covers Scientology’s “E-Meter,” a “religious artifact” and electronic that is core to Scientology.

...

“I read it as being related to E-Meters and E-Meter repair,” [a DMCA expert] added. “There’s YouTube channels of people who collect E-Meters and ephemera. I guess they’re worried about people trying to repair them. How you would tell if it’s functioning properly, I don’t know.”

Microchips added to wheels of parmigiano reggiano to fight counterfeiting

It's the latest innovation from the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium

parmigiano reggiano – the only kind which can be called parmesan within Europe – must be made in a small part of northern Italy, including in the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia.

In addition, the wheels of cheese – which weigh on average 40kg (88lb) – have to be matured for at least 12 months in a mountain area, and are tested by experts two years after production to ensure they make the grade.

...

Given the strict rules in attaining the certification, such delicacies usually sell for higher prices, making it an enticing market for copycats. Indeed, the PRC estimates that annual global sales of counterfeit cheese reach about $2bn (£1.6bn), not far off those of the authentic product

A federal judge ruled "AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable"

Hollywood Reporter:

The push for protection of works created by AI has been spearheaded by Thaler, chief executive of neural network firm Imagination Engines. In 2018, he listed an AI system, the Creativity Machine, as the sole creator of an artwork called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which was described as “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.”

...

U.S. copyright law, she underscored, “protects only works of human creation” and is “designed to adapt with the times.” There’s been a consistent understanding that human creativity is “at the core of copyrightability, even as that human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media,” the ruling stated.

While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that it does so only after a human develops a “mental conception” of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.