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    Copyright © RebelMouse 2017

    The Billy Graham smear on Trump just completely collapsed



    Last year, a group called "Evangelicals for Harris" tried to use famed preacher Billy Graham to attack Donald Trump.

    The group, now known as "Evangelicals for America," released an ad that spliced together old footage Graham with footage of Trump. The purpose of the ad was to weaponize Graham against Trump, trying to make it appear as if Graham himself was condemning Trump as "greedy," "proud and abusive," and violent.

    'Maybe they don’t know that my father appreciated the conservative values and policies of President [Trump] in 2016 ...'

    The ad ended with Graham declaring, "Keep clear of people like that."

    As Blaze News reported, the ad exposed Evangelicals for Harris to legal liability. Lawyers for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association reportedly sent the group multiple letters, including a cease-and-desist notice. The BGEA accused Evangelicals for Harris of "unauthorized, political use of the BGEA’s copyrighted video."

    At the time, Evangelicals for Harris lashed out at the BGEA's attempts to tell the truth about Graham and protect his image. The group accused Franklin Graham, the CEO of the BGEA, of using the "Trump playbook" to "silence" them.

    Ten months later, Evangelicals for America is singing a completely different tune — and admitting wrongdoing.

    Earlier this month, the group released a statement apologizing for using the footage of Graham. The organization also removed the ad from its platforms.

    "Our intent was not to infringe on BGEA's copyright or to give the impression that Rev. Graham would have taken a side in publicly supporting one political candidate over another in an election, so we apologize to BGEA," Evangelicals for America said in a statement.

    "We have continued dialogue with BGEA since the election, and we affirm its position that Rev. Graham's purpose was always clear: Telling people about God's Son, Jesus Christ, who alone came from heaven to earth to make a way for all mankind to be saved from our sins. He never politicized the Gospel of Jesus Christ or the works he created through BGEA," the statement continued.

    While it's not clear if voters were swayed by the ad, it did accumulate 30 million views before being removed, according to the Religion News Service.

    For Franklin Graham, the issue was not one he could ignore. Not only was Evangelicals for Harris potentially running afoul of copyright law, but Franklin believed the group was weaponizing his father to "mislead" voters.

    "The liberals are using anything and everything they can to promote candidate Harris. They even developed a political ad trying to use my father @BillyGraham’s image. They are trying to mislead people," Franklin said last year. "Maybe they don’t know that my father appreciated the conservative values and policies of President [Trump] in 2016, and if he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed."

    The BGEA said the apology from Evangelicals for America "speaks for itself."

    "We are grateful for the outcome," the BGEA told the Religion News Service.

    Mickey Mouse is teased as a ruthless murderer just one day after entering the public domain



    Walt Disney's most profitable rodent has scurried out of the company's total control and into bloody new arenas.

    Despite the corporate giant's desperate lobbying efforts to once again alter American copyright law to suit its purposes, Disney's Mickey Mouse entered into the public domain Monday along with various other notable characters and creative works, including "Mack the Knife," Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus," Buster Keaton' "The Cameraman," Agatha Christie's "The Mystery of the Blue Train," and Peter Pan.

    The ratty-looking versions of the mouse seen in the 1928 animated short films "Steamboat Willie," "Plane Crazy," and "Gallopin' Gaucho" appear to be getting a similar treatment to that recently received by Winnie the Pooh — another beloved animated character re-imagined as a savage killer following his entry into the public domain in 2022.

    Killer mouse

    Video game developer Nightmare Forge Games released a trailer Monday for its upcoming survival horror title Infestation 88, featuring a sickly-looking Mickey who hunts down player-controlled exterminators in a dark warehouse.

    "In the year 1988, what was thought be an outbreak of vermin morphed into something far more sinister," reads the description of the game on Steam. "Prepare to face and eliminate a horrific entity, with each episode containing a distinct classic character or urban legend responsible for the infestation."

    Infestation 88 - Official Reveal Traileryoutu.be

    A trailer also dropped Monday for a live-action slasher film entitled "Mickey's Mouse Trap," featuring a menace wearing a Mickey mask stalking prospective victims and attacking an individual.

    "A place for fun, a place for friends, a place for hunting. The mouse is out," the trailer telegraphs.

    The plot of the film, directed by Jamie Bailey, is described thusly on IMDB: "It's Alex's 21st Birthday, but she's stuck at the amusement arcade on a late shift so her friends decide to surprise her, but a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse decides to play a game of his own with them which she must survive."

    MICKEY'S MOUSE TRAP FILM TEASER TRAILER (2024) - FIRST EVER MICKEY MOUSE HORROR FILM!!!!youtu.be

    The Hollywood Reporter indicated the film does not have a release date and that it's unclear if its producers have a distributor on board.

    "We just wanted to have fun with it all. I mean it’s Steamboat Willie's Mickey Mouse murdering people," Bailey said in a statement. "It's ridiculous. We ran with it and had fun doing it and I think it shows."

    Copies and rights

    Both horror adaptations specifically feature the likeness of the mouse debuted in the late 1920s since all more recent versions remain the strict intellectual property of Disney, including the sorcerer's apprentice seen in the 1940 film "Fantasia" as well as the rodent featured in dozens of animated films throughout the 1930s.

    Kembrew McLeod, an intellectual property scholar at the University of Iowa, stressed to NPR that "[w]hat is going into the public domain is this particular appearance in this particular film."

    "Ever since Mickey Mouse's first appearance in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, people have associated the character with Disney's stories, experiences, and authentic products," a Disney spokesman told the Associated Press over the weekend. "That will not change when the copyright in the Steamboat Willie film expires."

    Whereas copyrights can lapse, "trademark law has no end," Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji told NPR.

    While the "Steamboat Willie" mouse can be shared, copied, and repurposed, Disney's trademark on Mickey Mouse apparently precludes people from using the character in such a way that misleads consumers into thinking the work has the blessing of the House of Mouse.

    Okediji warned that trademark law could be used to "effectively extend the life of a copyrighted work."

    In the case of Mickey, Disney might intervene if adaptations could be argued to infringe on or dilute the corresponding trademark on account of how the mouse is used.

    Daniel Mayeda from the UCLA School of Law similarly warned that adaptations could prove dicey, telling the Guardian in 2022, "You can use the Mickey Mouse character as it was originally created to create your own Mickey Mouse stories or stories with this character. But if you do so in a way that people will think of Disney – which is kind of likely because they have been investing in this character for so long – then in theory, Disney could say you violated my copyright."

    Disney indicated in a statement that extra to protecting "[its] rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright," it would "safeguard against consumer confusion caused by unauthorized uses of Mickey and our other iconic characters."

    Harvard Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet suggested in October that "people should be free to use the materials despite the existence of trademark rights, because trademark law shouldn't be able to stop you from doing what copyright law allows you to do and is set up to allow you to do. It's no accident that things go into the public domain."

    However, Tushnet added that the "contours of that are as yet unclear, precisely because Congress lengthened the copyright term, and so we didn't get this problem until recently."

    Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

    Streaming services pull AI-generated Drake-inspired song, but it's not clear the musician has a legitimate copyright claim



    The steel-driving man John Henry of American legend attempted to beat the machine and lost. Today, new technologies are steaming past America's top musicians and up the charts, but instead of railway ties, they are dropping beats.

    Multiple streaming platforms have taken down a new viral AI-generated song featuring vocals reminiscent of both Drake's and the Weeknd's respective styles.

    Although the musicians and their parent label Universal Music Group appear to have gotten their way in silencing the track, it's not clear whether they have a legitimate copyright claim or the right to do so. There are other recently released songs incorporating AI-generated celebrity sound-alikes that have been easy targets for complaints and removal since they contained borrowed instrumentation, lyrics, or other components that were copyright-protected.

    For instance, Rihanna's voice was mimicked in a transmogrified version of the Beyoncé hit "Cuff It." Even if Rihanna proved incapable of taking legal action, Beyoncé and her label certainly were in a position to do so.

    The 2-minute, 14-second song that made waves this week is, however, an original composition.
    "Heart on My Sleeve" was created by an artist who goes by Ghostwriter977 and has over 2.5 million likes on TikTok.
    Music Business Worldwide reported that the song is novel in composition and lyrics, but incorporates AI-generated vocals reminiscent of the voices of Drake and the Weeknd, whose real names are Aubrey Drake Graham and Abel Makkonen Tesfaye.
    Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research, told CNN that "AI could also have generated most of the song, lyrics and replicated the artists again based on the training data set and any prompts given to direct the AI model."
    Roberto Nickson, the entrepreneur and designer behind Eluna AI, evidenced how easy it was to emulate a celebrity's voice with AI in a recent Twitter video:
    \u201cAnd just like that. The music industry is forever changed.\n\nI recorded a verse, and had a trained AI model of Kanye replace my vocals.\n\nThe results will blow your mind. Utterly incredible.\u201d
    — Roberto Nickson (@Roberto Nickson) 1679796877
    UMG complained and successfully had Ghostwriter977's song all but scrubbed from the internet.
    It was removed this week from the streaming platforms Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, SoundCloud, Tidal, Deezer, and TikTok. According to Axios, the tune had over 600,000 plays on Spotify and 275,000 views on YouTube before it was taken down on the respective platforms. Altogether, it was reportedly streamed over 15 million times.
    \u201cAI Drake + The Weeknd banger \u201cheart on my sleeve\u201d at over 250k streams on Spotify already\u201d
    — Jenny AI (@Jenny AI) 1681675257
    The lyrics for the song have even been deleted from websites like Genius.
    UMG said in a statement that its "success has been, in part, due to embracing new technology and putting it to work for our artists–as we have been doing with our own innovation around AI for some time already."
    "With that said, however, the training of generative AI using our artists’ music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law) as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation," added the corporate giant.
    Axios has stressed that generative AI, whether the product be sonic or visual, is a "legal minefield," particularly in this case where Drake and the Weeknd neither wrote nor sang the song.
    There are presently lawsuits tackling the issue of AI systems using copyrighted works as inputs.
    For instance, Getty Images filed a lawsuit in January against AI art generator Stable Diffusion, alleging that the company copied 12 million images to train its AI model "without permission ... or compensation," reported the Verge.
    Getty said in a statement, "It is Getty Images’ position that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators."
    The results of such legal actions may set a precedent applicable to the release of songs like Ghostwriter977's, where potentially copyrighted content served to train AI models to create a novel product.

    Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

    What It Means To Own Something In The 21st Century

    Law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman's book 'Mine!' argues we need to rethink the concept of ownership. Their ideas are engaging, if not always convincing.

    VIDEO: Cop plays Beatles' 'Yesterday' while cellphone camera records him, presumably to trigger copyright claim so clip is blocked



    Some Beverly Hills cops are getting back at a left-wing activist who takes videos of them — with a good bit of wit attached to it.

    What happened?

    Vice News reported that Los Angeles-area activist Sennett Devermont recorded cellphone video as he was trying to talk to uniformed Beverly Hills police officers on a sidewalk last month — but the chatter was interrupted by a familiar sound.

    It was coming from Officer Julian Reyes' cellphone he was holding aloft. It was an acoustic guitar, and a man singing: "Yesterday / all my troubles seemed so far away / now it looks as though they're here to stay / oh, I believe in yesterday."

    Yup, it was Paul McCartney singing the Beatles' classic "Yesterday" — arguably one of the most popular songs ever, as it was performed over 7 million times just in the 20th century — and recorded more than 1,600 times.

    As you can probably guess, the Beatles rightfully are quite protective of unauthorized uses of their songs, and when they show up in videos, those clips are typically blocked.

    According to Devermont, the tactic worked. He noted in his Instagram post of the interaction with police that "it seems they think playing copyrighted and licensed music will keep the word from getting out. And turns out.. they are right! I sent this video to multiple news agencies who covered the story. Most said they can't share it... why??? Because it's playing Beatles music."

    Vice News said songs like "Yesterday" showing up in Instagram videos can trigger the platform's algorithmic copyright filters which can result in videos being taken down — and suspension of live streamers' accounts for repeated infractions.

    A sublime idea

    When the latter video began, Vice News said Devermont was talking to Sgt. Billy Fair, who used his cellphone to play "Santeria" by '90s band Sublime when Devermont was trying to talk to him in a separate video — and Devermont was quite frustrated:

    More from Vice News:

    This strategy isn't entirely surprising. Nick Simmons and Adam Holland, researchers at Lumen Database, which studies copyright takedowns on social media, noted last year that music in videos filmed at Black Lives Matter protests had repeatedly resulted in them being removed from social media sites on copyright grounds. They theorized that, while these removals seemed incidental, that copyright could be weaponized by police.

    "Law enforcement, or indeed anyone of any ideological persuasion who was seeking to prevent videos of a particular event from being shared online, need only make sure that copyrighted audio is present with sufficiently recognizable clarity and volume in the background of a protest or other event," they wrote. "A chilling prospect indeed."

    Now, we're seeing it actually happen.

    What did Beverly Hills police have to say?

    Beverly Hills police told Vice News in a statement that "the playing of music while accepting a complaint or answering questions is not a procedure that has been recommended by Beverly Hills Police command staff" — and that the videos of Fair were "currently under review."

    To mark this sobering development, here's a live version of McCartney playing the melancholy "Yesterday" in 1965 when it was brand new:

    Yesterday (With Spoken Word Intro / Live From Studio 50, New York City / 1965)youtu.be

    Supreme Court Justices Slam Google For Cheating Its Way To The Top

    While a decision in Google v. Oracle isn’t expected for a few months, the justices’ pointed questioning at the Big Tech giant indicates Google broke the law to get ahead.

    Twitter removes Trump campaign video featuring the president's head on 49ers' Brandon Aiyuk



    Twitter on Tuesday removed a Trump campaign video featuring President Donald Trump's head superimposed over that of 49ers rookie wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk.

    The social media company insisted that the president violated the platform's copyright rules.

    Aiyuk scored on an impressive 38-yard touchdown run Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles, leaping over Eagles safety Marcus Epps in the process.

    What are the details?

    According to Newsweek, the video showed Trump — acting as Aiyuk — leaping over a graphic depicting COVID-19's structure — acting as Epps.

    The move, according to the outlet, seemed to indicate that "Trump had hurdled over coronavirus as easily as Aiyuk and jumped over Epps on his way to score."

    Following his Monday night release from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the president tweeted, "Don't let [coronavirus] dominate you. Don't be afraid of it. You're gonna beat it. ... Don't let it dominate, don't let it take over your lives. Don't let that happen."

    As it concluded, the video then cut to ITV News footage featuring an anti-Trump protester screaming "No!" during Trump's inauguration.

    Team Trump — the Trump 2020 campaign's official Twitter account — shared the video on Monday, but Twitter later disabled playback video of the clip citing a report from the copyright owner.

    A warning slapped over where the video used to live reads, "This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner."

    'Can they do this?'

    Of the ad, Ryan Williams — Aiyuk's agent — said, "His simple question was, 'Can they do this?'" And I went on the attack."

    Williams also said that the NFL was also attempting to have the video taken down.

    "Our contact at Twitter told us the NFL was also working to get it taken down for copyright (infringement)," he explained. "So it was taken down.''

    Williams added, "It's interesting to me that for someone who at one point referred to football players as 'sons of b*****s,' him and his campaign sure do like to use football when it's convenient for them."

    You can watch an archived version of the video here, or a low-quality version of the clip here and below.

    Trump Touchdown - Parody www.youtube.com

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