In 2006 MySpace reportedly became America's most-visited web site — passing both Google and Yahoo Mail.

So what happened? TribLive reports: The co-founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580 million in 2005, and that company sold it to the online advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake in 2011, which later became the ad tech firm Viant, according to SlashGear. Viant was bought by Time in 2016, which was acquired by Meredith Corporation at the end of 2017, according to The Guardian. Meredith then sold Myspace to Viant Technology LLC, which currently operates the platform, SlashGear said.

During its time under Timberlake, Myspace morphed from a social media platfrom and turned over a new leaf as a music discovery site, SlashGear reported. The once booming online atmosphere has turned into a ghost town, according to The Guardian. Despite the number of people on Myspace dwindling, a handful of devoted users remains.
The glory days of MySpace drew this bittersweet remembrance from TechRadar: Not everyone on the TechRadar team looks back on those early MySpace years fondly, with our US editor in chief Lance Ulanoff recalling that it "it was like peoples' brains had been turned inside out and whatever didn't stick, dropped onto the page and was represented as a GIF".

Many of us do, though, remember picking our Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible.

"Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap," writes Decrypt.co. "Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it" on America's Security and Exchange Commission "in a novel lawsuit — and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again." Over and again, the SEC has sued cherry-picked NFT projects it says qualify as unregistered securities — but never once has the regulator defined what types of NFT projects are legal and which are not, casting a chill over the nascent industry... [In 2019] Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn't a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye — not then, and not after several more self-incriminating correspondences from the professor. But in due time, the agency began vigorously pursuing, and suing, NFT projects.
So 10 months ago, Jonathan Mann — who writes a new song every day and shares it online — crafted a song titled "This Song is A Security." As a seller of NFTs himself, Mann wrote the song "to fight back against the SEC, and defend his right — plus the rights of other artists like him — to earn revenue," according to the article: Frye, who'd practically been salivating for such an opportunity for half a decade, was a natural fit.... In the lawsuit filed against the SEC in Louisiana earlier this week, they challenged the SEC's standing to regulate their NFT-backed artworks as securities, and demanded the agency declare that their respective art projects do not constitute illegal, unregistered securities offerings.
More from the International Business Times: The complaint asked the court to clarify whether the SEC should regulate art and whether artists were supposed to "register" their artworks before selling the pieces to the general public. The complaint also asked whether artists should be "forced to make public disclosures about the 'risks' of buying their art," and whether artists should be "required to comply" with federal securities laws...

The Blockchain Association, a collective crypto group that includes some of the biggest digital asset firms, asserted that the SEC has no authority over NFT art. "We support the plaintiffs in their quest for legal clarity," the group said.
In an interview with Slashdot, Mann says he started his "Song a Day" project almost 17 years ago (when he was 26 years old) — and his interest in NFTs is sincere: "Over the years, I've always sought a way to make Song A Day sustainable financially, through video contests, conference gigs, ad revenue, royalties, Patreon and more.

"When I came across NFTs in 2017, they didn't have a name. We just called them 'digital collectibles'. For the last 2+ years, NFTs have become that self-sustaining model for my work.

"I know most people believe NFTs are a joke at best and actively harmful at worst. Even most people in the crypto community have given up on them. Despite all that, I still believe they're worth pursuing.

"Collecting an NFT from an artist you love is the most direct way to support them. There's no multinational corporation, no payment processor, and no venture capitalists between you and the artist you want to support."
Slashdot also tracked down the SEC's Office of Public Affairs, and got an official response from SEC public affairs specialist Ryan White.

Slashdot: The suit argues that the SEC's approach "threatens the livelihoods of artists and creators that are simply experimenting with a novel, fast-growing technology," and seeks guidance in the face of a "credible threat of enforcement". Is the SEC going to respond to this lawsuit? And if you don't have an answer at this time, can you give me a general comment on the issues and concerns being raised?

SEC Public Affairs Specialist Ryan White: We would decline comment.

Decrypt.co points out that the lawsuit "has no guarantee of offering some conclusive end to the NFT regulation question... That may only come with concrete legislation or a judgment by the Supreme Court."

But Mann's song still makes a very public show out of their concerns — with Mann even releasing a follow-up song titled "I'm Suing the SEC." (Its music video mixes together wacky clips of Mila Kunis's Stoner Cats and Fonzie jumping a shark with footage of NFT critics like Elizabeth Warren and SEC chairman Gary Gensler.)

And an earlier song also used auto-tune to transform Gensler's remarks about cryptocurrencies into the chorus of a song titled "Hucksters, Fraudsters, Scam Artists, Ponzi Schemes".

Mann later auctioned an NFT of the song — for over $3,000 in Ethereum.

Apple reported a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent from a year ago, fueled largely by new iPad sales. iPad "saw the biggest category increase for the quarter, up from $5.8 billion to $7.2 billion year-over-year," reports TechCrunch. It helped counter slowed iPhone revenue, "which dropped from $39.7 billion to $39.3 billion year-on-year." From the report: In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple's most important category by a wide margin, followed by service, which includes software offerings like iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Music. That category continued to grow, up to $24.2 billion from $21.2 billion over the same three-month period last year. Much of the iPhone slowdown can be attributed to the greater China region. Overall, the region dropped from $15.8 billion to $14.7 billion for the quarter. Canalys figures from last week show a marked decline in iPhone sales, down 6.7% from 10.4 million to 9.7 million for the quarter, Reuters reported.

The drop in Apple's third-largest region (behind the Americas and Europe) had a clear impact on the company's bottom line. The company aggressively discounted iPhone prices in China starting in May, as competition intensified from domestic rivals. The strategy resulted in strong iPhone sales that month, up close to 40% from a year prior. [...] Q3 marked the second consecutive quarter decline for global iPhone sales. The news puts additional pressure on the generative AI strategy that the company laid out at WWDC in June.

AI music generators Suno and Udio responded to the lawsuits filed by the major recording labels, arguing that their platforms are tools for making new, original music that "didn't and often couldn't previously exist."

"Those genres and styles -- the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music -- are not something that anyone owns," the companies said. "Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself." TorrentFreak reports: "[The labels] frame their concern as one about 'copies' of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology -- that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don't want is competition." The labels' position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren't stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, "outputting a collage of 'samples' stitched together from existing recordings" when prompted by users.

"[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings," Suno explains. "From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings -- what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on." These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it's from that information new music is made.

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that's certainly not the case here. "The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement." With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, "that key point makes all the difference," Suno's conclusion is served raw. "That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product." Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a "no AI" policy on licensees, to claims that they "may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal." The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels' dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. "No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. "Plaintiffs' contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values." You can read Suno and Udio's answers to the RIAA's lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).

AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. From a report: In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music.

"Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.

Re-visiting the Napster era, Stephen Witt's book How Music Got Free has been adapted into a two-part documentary on Paramount+. But the documentary's director believes "The real innovative minds here were a bunch of rogue teenagers and a guy working a blue-collar factory job in the tiny town of Shelby, North Carolina," according to this article in the Guardian: By day, [Glover] worked at Universal Music's CD manufacturing plant in North Carolina, from which he smuggled out hot albums by stars like Mary J Blige and 50 Cent before they were even released. For the documentary, Glover spoke openly, and largely without regret, as did others who worked at that plant who did their own share of stealing. Part of their incentive was class revenge: while they were paid piddling wages by the hour, the industry used the products they manufactured to mint millions. To maximize profits on his end, Glover set up a subscription service to let those in his circle know what CDs and movies were coming. "He was doing what Netflix would later do," Stapleton said...

In the meantime, the record companies and their lobbying arm, the RIAA, focused their wrath on the most public face of file-sharing: Napster. In truth, all Fanning's company did was make more accessible the work the pirates innovated and first distributed... For its part, the music industry reacted in the worst way possible, PR-wise. They sued the kids who made up their strongest fanbase. "One of the key lessons we learned from this era is that you can't sue your way out of a situation like this," Witt said. "You have to build a new technology that supersedes what the pirates did."

Eventually, that's what happened, though the first attempts in that direction made things worse than ever for the labels and stars. When Apple first created the iPod in 2001, there wasn't yet an Apple store where listeners could purchase music legally. "It was just a place to put your stolen MP3s," said Witt. Labels couldn't sue Apple because of a ruling dictating that the manufacturer of a device couldn't be held responsible for piracy enacted by its users. While Steve Jobs later modified his approach, creating a way for fans to buy individual songs for the iPod, "that did more damage to the industry than anything", Witt said. "Whereas, before they could sell a $15 CD to fans who really just wanted one song, now those fans could get that song for just a dollar...."

Eventually, the collective efforts of the streaming companies returned the music industry to massive profitability, though often at the expense of its artists, who often receive a meager slice of the proceeds.... Things ended less favorably for the pirates, some of whom now have criminal records. Likewise, Glover served a short prison sentence though, today, he is chief maintenance technician at the Ryder Truck manufacturing plant in his home town.
A Forbes senior contributor (and director Alexandria Stapleton) believe that for the younger generation it may be "their first introduction to why the music industry is the way that they're used to."

And Stapleton says their sympathies are with those factory workers. Stapleton: They were completely underpaid. They were making literally nothing. It's important for people to understand that while the industry was charging $20 for a CD, it cost like 20 cents to make. That's a big profit margin. And to have a factory that was paying barely enough for people to put food on the table, I think there's something wrong with that...

Witt: It's amazing to think about what they were really doing, which was essentially filling the technological vacuum that the record industry was refusing to fill, right? The record industry was not building out the successor technology to the compact disc because the compact disc was just too profitable for them. Instead, a bunch of random teenagers built the next generation of technology for them, and yeah, it caused a lot of damage. But I don't think that teenagers were necessarily trying to hurt anyone... They weren't malicious. They just were fascinated by how this stuff worked. And of course, they were also completely entranced by the celebrity of the musicians themselves.
In the interview Witt adds that a lot of those teenagers "were really kind of traumatized by their experience with the FBI I would say, and they wanted to get that story out there."

The documentary was produced by LeBron James and Eminem, "who rode the tail end of the CD boom to stratospheric heights," remembers a Fast Company opinion columnist. (And 25 years later, that columnist has gone back to listening to vinyl records, which "reignited for me a long-missing air of full engagement... Technology marches forward, except when it occasionally lurches backward...")

NASA: The stars above and on Earth aligned as an inspirational message and lyrics from the song "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" by hip-hop artist Missy Elliott were beamed to Venus via NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network). The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California sent the transmission at 10:05 a.m. PDT on Friday, July 12. As the largest and most sensitive telecommunication service of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, the DSN has an array of giant radio antennas that allow missions to track, send commands, and receive scientific data from spacecraft venturing to the Moon and beyond. To date, the system has transmitted only one other song into space, making the transmission of Elliott's song a first for hip-hop and NASA.

"Both space exploration and Missy Elliott's art have been about pushing boundaries," said Brittany Brown, director, Digital and Technology Division, Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington, who initially pitched ideas to Missy's team to collaborate with the agency. "Missy has a track record of infusing space-centric storytelling and futuristic visuals in her music videos, so the opportunity to collaborate on something out of this world is truly fitting." The song traveled about 158 million miles (254 million kilometers) from Earth to Venus -- the artist's favorite planet. Transmitted at the speed of light, the radio frequency signal took nearly 14 minutes to reach the planet. The transmission was made by the 34-meter (112-foot) wide Deep Space Station 13 (DSS-13) radio dish antenna, located at the DSN's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, near Barstow in California. Coincidentally, the DSS-13 also is nicknamed Venus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Just before the weekend, dozens of record labels including UMG, Warner, and Sony, filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon at a New York federal court. In common with previous lawsuits that accused rivals of similar inaction, Verizon Communications Inc., Verizon Services Corp., and Cellco Partnership (dba Verizon Wireless), stand accused of assisting subscribers to download and share pirated music, by not doing enough to stop them. The labels' complaint introduces Verizon as one of the largest ISPs in the country, one that "knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates."

Knowledge of infringement, the labels say, was established at Verizon over a period of several years during which it received "hundreds of thousands" of copyright notices, referencing instances of infringement allegedly carried out by its subscribers. The complaint cites Verizon subscribers' persistent use of BitTorrent networks to download and share pirated music, with Verizon allegedly failing to curtail their activity. "While Verizon is famous for its 'Can you hear me now?' advertising campaign, it has intentionally chosen not to listen to complaints from copyright owners. Instead of taking action in response to those infringement notices as the law requires, Verizon ignored Plaintiffs' notices and buried its head in the sand," the labels write.

"Undeterred, infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiffs' notices continued to use Verizon's services to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights with impunity. Meanwhile, Verizon continued to provide its high-speed service to thousands of known repeat infringers so it could continue to collect millions of dollars from them." Through this lawsuit, which references piracy of songs recorded by artists including The Rolling Stones, Ariana Grande, Bob Dylan, Bruno Mars, Elvis Presley, Dua Lipa, Drake, and others, the labels suggest that Verizon will have no choice but to hear them now. [...]

Attached to the complaint, Exhibit A contains a non-exhaustive list of the plaintiffs' copyright works allegedly infringed by Verizon's subscribers. The document is over 400 pages long, with each track listed representing potential liability for Verizon as a willful, intentional, and purposeful contributory infringer, the complaint notes. This inevitably leads to claims based on maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per copyrighted work infringed on Count I (contributory infringement). The statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work is also applied to Count II (vicarious infringement), based on the labels' claim that Verizon derived a direct financial benefit from the direct infringements of its subscribers. The labels' complaint can be found here (PDF).

From The New York Times: The key to "Eno" comes near the beginning of the film — at least, the beginning of the first version I saw. The musician Brian Eno, the documentary's subject, notes that the fun of the kind of art he makes is that it's a two-way street. "The audience's brain does the cooking and keeps seeing relationships," he says.

Most movies are made up of juxtapositions of scenes, carefully selected and designed by the editor. But "Eno," directed by Gary Hustwit, turns that convention on its head. Writ large, it's a meditation on creativity. But every version of the movie you see is different, generated by a set of rules that dictate some things about the film, while leaving others to chance. (I've seen it twice, and maybe half the same material appeared across both films.)

Eno, one of the most innovative and celebrated musicians and producers of his generation, has fiddled with randomness in his musical practice for decades, often propelled along by new technologies. He agreed to participate in "Eno" only if it, too, could be an example of what he and others have long called generative art... "Brain One", programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run. Dawes's system selects from a database of 30 hours of new interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive and, following a system of rules set down by the filmmakers with code, creating a new film. According to the filmmakers, there are 52 quintillion (that is, 52 billion billion) possible combinations, which means the chances of Brain One generating two exact copies of "Eno" are so small as to be functionally zero.
"But the ambitions of Eno are greater than the film itself," writes the Verge, with director Hustwit hoping for a cinematic future exploring generative filmmaking with their software and hardware package. "We have a patent pending on the system, and we just launched a startup called Anamorph that is basically exploring this idea further with other filmmakers and studios and streamers."

In an interview with the Verge, Hustwit points out that Brian Eno did the soundtrack for his previous film. "I was having these thoughts about, well, why can't showing a film be more performative? Why does it have to be this static thing every time?"


The film just began a two-week run at Greenwich Village's nonprofit theatre Film Forum, and in the U.K. is appearing this week at 17 Picturehouse Cinemas across England and Scotland. Check this online schedule for upcoming dates this week in Nashville (Thursday), Austin (Friday), Dallas (Saturday) — with later dates this month including Toronto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and more cities in August.

YouTube has released an AI-powered eraser tool to help creators easily remove copyrighted music from their videos without affecting other audio such as dialog or sound effects. TechCrunch's Ivan Mehta reports: On its support page, YouTube still warns that, at times, the algorithm might fail to remove just the song. "This edit might not work if the song is hard to remove. If this tool doesn't successfully remove the claim on a video, you can try other editing options, such as muting all sound in the claimed segments or trimming out the claimed segments," the company said.

Alternatively, creators can choose to select "Mute all sound in the claimed segments" to silence bits of video that possibly has copyrighted material. Once the creator successfully edits the video, YouTube removes the content ID claim -- the company's system for identifying the use of copyrighted content in different clips. YouTube shared a video describing the feature on its Creator Insider channel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Hikari-no-Akari, a long-established and popular pirate site that specializes in Japanese music, is being targeted in U.S. federal court by Sony Music. [...] The music download portal, which links to externally hosted files, has been operating for well over a decade and currently draws more than a million monthly visits. In addition to the public-facing part of the site, HnA also has a private forum and Discord channel. [...] Apparently, Sony Music Japan has been keeping an eye on the unauthorized music portal. The company has many of its works shared on the site, including anime theme music, which is popular around the globe.

For example, a few weeks ago, HnA posted "Sayonara, Mata Itsuka!" from the Japanese artist Kenshi Yonezu, which is used as the theme song for the asadora series "The Tiger and Her Wings." Around the same time, PEACEKEEPER, a song by Japanese musician STEREO DIVE FOUNDATION, featured in the third season of the series "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime", was shared on the site. Sony Music Japan is a rightsholder for both these tracks, as well as many others that were posted on the site. The music company presumably tried to contact HnA directly to have these listings removed and reached out to its CDN service Cloudflare too, asking it to take action. [...] They are a prerequisite for obtaining a DMCA subpoena, which Sony Music Japan requested at a California federal court this week.

Sony requested two DMCA subpoenas, both targeted at hikarinoakari.com and hnadownloads.co. The latter domain receives the bulk of its traffic from the first, which isn't a surprise considering the 'hnadownloads' name. Through the subpoena, the music company hopes to obtain additional information on the people behind these sites. That includes, names, IP-addresses, and payment info. Presumably, this will be used for follow-up enforcement actions. It's unclear whether Cloudflare will be able to hand over any usable information and for the moment, HnA remains online. Several of the infringing URLs that were identified by Sony have recently been taken down, including this one. However, others remain readily available. The same applies to private forum threads and Discord postings, of course.

Longtime Slashdot reader regoli shares an obituary from the Wall Street Journal: When Alan Ashton was a computer-science professor at Brigham Young University in the mid-1970s, the director of the school's marching band knocked on his door and said he wanted to use a computer to choreograph the band's halftime shows. Ashton was easily persuaded; he was a trumpet player whose Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Utah was "Electronics, music and computers." Bruce Bastian, the graduate student who was working as BYU's marching-band director, turned out to be a quick learner. "He was very conscientious, very thorough," Ashton said in an interview, "and just absolutely brilliant." Within a few years, the two were at work on a program that would turn them into two of the richest people in the nation, founders of the company that made WordPerfect, the dominant word-processing software in the 1980s and early '90s and one of the first pieces of software many Americans bought when they brought home their first PCs.

But behind the hundreds of millions of dollars and blockbuster success, Bastian's personal life, he later said, was in "free fall." Between the time he and Ashton released what would later be known as WordPerfect to the public in 1980 and when they sold the company for $1.4 billion in 1994, Bastian told his wife, four sons and his Mormon community that he was gay and leaving both his marriage and the church. When he died, June 16, at the age of 76 from complications associated with pulmonary fibrosis, he had been living a different life: A longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights, Bastian was married to a man, and had found a way to maintain relationships with his family, who remained dedicated members of the church that rejected his sexual orientation. "I kind of have three parts of my life," he said in 2010 during one of several extensive interviews he gave to the Mormon Stories podcast, "the pre-WordPerfect life, the WordPerfect years, and now the LGBT years." Other publications remembering Bruce Bastian include: The New York Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, University of Utah, and Human Rights Campaign.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Seven content-licensing sellers of music, image, video and other datasets for use in training artificial intelligence systems have formed the sector's first trade group, they said on Wednesday. The Dataset Providers Alliance (DPA) will advocate for 'ethical data sourcing' in the training of AI systems, including rights for people depicted in datasets and the protection of content owners' intellectual property rights, the companies said in a statement. Founding members include U.S. music dataset company Rightsify, image licensing service vAIsual, Japanese stock photo provider Pixta and Germany-based data marketplace Datarade.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: In recent weeks, as so-called cheap fake video clips suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair. The video is called "Bye, Bye Biden" and has been viewed more than 5 million times on X since it was first promoted in the middle of May. It depicts Biden as senile, wearing a hearing aid, and taking a lot of medication. It also shows him giving money to a character who seems to represent illegal migrants while denying money to US citizens until they change their costume to mimic the Ukrainian flag. Another scene shows Biden opening the front door of a family home that features a Confederate flag on the wall and allowing migrants to come in and take over. Finally, the video contains references to stolen election conspiracies pushed by former president Donald Trump.

The video was created by Little Bug, a group that mimics the style of Little Big, a real Russian band that fled the country in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The video features several Moscow-based actors -- who spoke with Russian media outlet Agency.Media -- but also appears to use artificial intelligence technology to make the actors resemble Biden and Trump, as well as Ilya Prusikin, the lead singer of Little Big. "Biden and Trump appear to be the same actor, with deepfake video-editing changing his facial features until he resembles Biden in one case and Trump in the other case," says Alex Fink, an AI and machine-vision expert who analyzed the video for WIRED. "The editing is inconsistent, so you can see that in some cases he resembles Biden more and in others less. The facial features keep changing." An analysis by True Media, a nonprofit that was founded to tackle the spread of election-related deepfakes, found with 100 percent confidence that there was AI-generated audio used in the video. It also assessed with 78 percent confidence that some AI technology was used to manipulate the faces of the actors.

Fink says the obvious nature of the deepfake technology on display here suggests that the video was created in a rush, using a small number of iterations of a generative adversarial network in order to create the characters of Biden and Trump. It is unclear who is behind the video, but "Bye, Bye Biden" has been promoted by the Kremlin-aligned network known as Doppelganger. The campaign posted tens of thousands of times on X and was uncovered by Antibot4Navalny, an anonymous collective of Russian researchers who have been tracking Doppelganger's activity for the past six months. The campaign first began on May 21, and there have been almost 4,000 posts on X promoting the video in 13 languages that were promoted by a network of almost 25,000 accounts. The Antibot4Navalny researchers concluded that the posts were written with the help of generative AI technology. The video has been shared 6.5 million times on X and has been viewed almost 5 million times.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Toys "R" Us announced that it had partnered with an ad agency called Native Foreign to create what it calls "the first-ever brand film using OpenAI's new text-to-video tool, Sora." OpenAI debuted Sora in February, but the video synthesis tool has not yet become available to the public. The brand film tells the story of Toys "R" Us founder Charles Lazarus using AI-generated video clips. "We are thrilled to partner with Native Foreign to push the boundaries of Sora, a groundbreaking new technology from OpenAI that's gaining global attention," wrote Toys "R" Us on its website. "Sora can create up to one-minute-long videos featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters, all generated from text instruction. Imagine the excitement of creating a young Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys "R" Us, and envisioning his dreams for our iconic brand and beloved mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe in the early 1930s."

The company says that The Origin of Toys "R" Us commercial was co-produced by Toys "R" Us Studios President Kim Miller Olko as executive producer and Native Foreign's Nik Kleverov as director. "Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time, and we wanted to honor his legacy with a spot using the most cutting-edge technology available," Miller Olko said in a statement. In the video, we see a child version of Lazarus, presumably generated using Sora, falling asleep and having a dream that he is flying through a land of toys. Along the way, he meets Geoffery, the store's mascot, who hands the child a small red car. Many of the scenes retain obvious hallmarks of AI-generated imagery, such as unnatural movement, strange visual artifacts, and the irregular shape of eyeglasses. [...] Although the Toys "R" Us video uses key visual elements from Sora, it still required quite a bit of human post-production work to put it together. Sora eliminated the need for actors and cameras, but creating successful generations and piecing together the rest still took human scriptwriters and VFX artists to fill in the AI model's shortcomings. "The brand film was almost entirely created with Sora, with some corrective VFX and an original music score composed by Aaron Marsh of famed indie rock band Copeland," wrote Toys "R" Us in a press release. Comedy writer Mike Drucker wrapped up several of these criticisms into one post, writing: "Love this commercial is like, 'Toys R Us started with the dream of a little boy who wanted to share his imagination with the world. And to show how, we fired our artists and dried Lake Superior using a server farm to generate what that would look like in Stephen King's nightmares.'"

Other critical comments were more frank. Filmmaker Joe Russo posted: "TOYS 'R US released an AI commercial and it fucking sucks."

YouTube is negotiating with major record labels to license songs for AI tools that clone popular artists' music, according to Financial Times. The Google-owned platform is offering upfront payments to Sony, Warner, and Universal to secure rights for training AI software, aiming to launch new features this year. But there are roadblocks to the deal, the story adds: However, many artists remain fiercely opposed to AI music generation, fearing it could undermine the value of their work. Any move by a label to force their stars into such a scheme would be hugely controversial. [...]

YouTube last year began testing a generative AI tool that lets people create short music clips by entering a text prompt. The product, initially named "Dream Track," was designed to imitate the sound and lyrics of well-known singers. But only 10 artists agreed to participate in the test phase, including Charli XCX, Troye Sivan and John Legend, and Dream Track was made available to a just small group of creators.

MTVNews.com has been shut down, with more than two decades' worth of content no longer available. "Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similar fate," adds Variety. From the report: In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site's launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News' vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly "Mixtape Monday" column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers. "So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace," Patrick Hosken, former music editor for MTV News, wrote on X. "All because it didn't fit some executives' bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word."

"sickening (derogatory) to see the entire @mtvnews archive wiped from the internet," Crystal Bell, culture editor at Mashable and one-time entertainment director of MTV News, posted on X."decades of music history gone... including some very early k-pop stories."

"This is disgraceful. They've completely wiped the MTV News archive," longtime Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt commented. "Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why?"

The report notes that some MTV News articles may be available via internet archiving services like the Wayback Machine. However, older articles aren't available.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11's initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it. Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos.

Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation. Automatic folder backup in OneDrive is a very useful feature when used properly and when the user deliberately enables it. However, Microsoft decided that sending a few notification prompts to enable folder backup was not enough, so it just turned the feature on without asking anybody or even letting users know about it, resulting in a flood of Reddit posts about users complaining about what the hell are those green checkmarks next to files and shortcuts on their desktops.

A group of record labels including the big three -- Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records -- are suing two of the top names in generative AI music making, alleging the companies violated their copyright "en masse." From a report: The two AI companies, Suno and Udio, use text prompts to churn out original songs. Both companies have enjoyed a level of success: Suno is available for use in Microsoft Copilot though a partnership with the tech giant. Udio was used to create "BBL Drizzy," one of the more notable examples of AI music going viral.

The case against Suno was filed in Boston federal court, and the Udio case was filed in New York. The labels say artists across genres and eras had their work used without consent. The lawsuits were brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the powerful group representing major players in the music industry, and a group of labels. The RIAA is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work, along with other fees.

Apple is imposing unfair restrictions on developers of apps for its App Store in violation of a new European Union law meant to encourage competition in the tech industry, regulators in Brussels said on Monday. From a report: The charges further escalated a tussle between Apple, which says its products are designed in the best interest of customers, and E.U. regulators, who say the company is unfairly using its size and considerable resources to stifle competition. Apple is the first company to be charged for violating the Digital Markets Act, a law passed in 2022 that gives European regulators wide authority to force the largest "online gatekeepers" to change their business practices.

After initiating an investigation in March, E.U. regulators said Apple was putting unlawful restrictions on companies that make games, music services and other applications. Under the law, also known as the D.M.A., Apple cannot limit how companies communicate with customers about sales and other offers and content available outside the App Store. The company faces a penalty of 10 percent of global revenue, a fine that could go up to 20 percent for repeat infringements, regulators said. Apple reported $383 billion in revenue last year. "Today is a very important day for the effective enforcement of the D.M.A.," said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in charge of competition policy. She said Apple's App Store policies make developers more dependent on the company and prevent consumers from being aware of better offers.