Brandon Butler

Bu I deny the first premise. Some of the market for news may turn out to have been a market for one-off facts (who won the game last night?), but the idea that AI summaries will kill news assumes that’s all anyone wants. I think some people still want newspapers. And Wordle.

That’s not the point. The complaint is that people should only be getting a list of links to the websites where that dubious info resides and then be compelled to go there to read the original prose, and consume the associated ads. When they don’t do that, media suffers!

Saying AI summaries are the end of publishing is like saying encyclopedias are the end, or dictionaries, or libraries.

What they “take” from the web are facts, or they try to be. They are answers to questions. If that satisfies me, I was probably not on the market for a New Yorker article or an issue of the Atlantic, and if they got my click pre-AI it was only so I could skim for my answer.

No one owns facts, though. I suspect any media that suffers as a result of AI summaries suffers because people didn’t want the media; they just wanted the facts. 🤷🏻‍♂️

ED @bb.usefairuse.com se.com & OSI Senior US Policy Manager @ksteen-james.bsky.social highlight how OSI's contributions to the coalition will help protect an open internet that encourages creativity, preserves access to knowledge, and remains open, equitable & driven by the public interest.

Thrilled to welcome @opensource.org to @recreatecoalition.bsky.social!!!!

YouTube video by LUXXURY should these guys *own* reggaetón? 🤷‍♀️

should these guys own reggaetón? 🤷‍♀️ (spoiler: no!!) let’s keep rhythm in the public domain where it belongs so *everyone* can freely use it ✨
youtube.com/shorts/0U2RJ...

Humble suggestion for a new term for the legal ed lexicon: “LEI Hire,” meaning someone whose primary attraction to hiring committees is their dedication to Law and Economics Ideology. If your title includes “Olin,” you may be an LEI Hire.

Wild, I thought I heard this was going away! Whew!

"this is an ideological project to remove local news access from rural communities, which only have one or two news sources. It eliminates access to information within one’s own community. This is about changing the information ecosystem that eliminates local news and replaces it with national news"

Tweet reading: It's maddening because it's mainly far right politicians talking about this in the UK, so we're watching people fall down the alt right pipeline in real time because they do care about this and are shocked by it 😬 desperately need more left wing voices talking about this

Left wing voices have completely abdicated the issue of civil liberties/free speech online and now the extreme far right is taking the issue up and recruiting people off the backlash to age verification. Especially young gamers

YouTube video by Road Less Marveled May 1, 1969: Fred Rogers testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications

With news that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down due to Trump’s meddling, it’s worth watching Mr. Rogers testifying to the Senate about the real value of what we’ve all lost.

Fans couldn't be fans, and a Comic Con would be a pretty drab affair, without fair use! For this #fairusefriday, check out coverage of some highlights from the convention below:

If you or someone you know wants to join these fine folks on our list of satisfied customers, check us out - usefairuse.com

I made a schedule for Birmingham's Sidewalk Fest (August 19-24) with only Jaszi Butler clients on it. 😎 You could spend the whole fest just watching movies we worked on - and I can vouch, they're all amazing.
sidewalkfest.com/festival/si...

Another day, another misbegotten copyright bill. Have we learned nothing from the useless CASE Act and the broken Italian "Piracy Shield"? Whack-a-mole is Big Content's favorite metaphor, and it's what we feel like having to punch back at every one-sided, misguided © bill.

About Amazon MGM Studios: Amazon MGM (Metro Goldwyn Mayer) is a leading entertainment company focused on the production and global distribution of film and t... Spaceballs 2 | Announcement

Hollywood, mecca of originality, under threat from the robots lol. OTOH, excited there's gonna be another Spaceballs!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsK...

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people saying "glad I'm not on spotify," the website you are presently on is doing the same thing. they're required to by UK law now

Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.

getting my phrenology checked by my laptop camera before I can listen to WAP, a future I always wanted www.404media.co/spotify-uk-a...

Ghislaine Maxwell’s money came from her dad Robert Maxwell, UK publishing magnate and Founding Father of commercial academic publishing. Sounds like a swell guy. This Guardian Longread retells how Maxwell created the vampire squid stuck to the face of academe: www.theguardian.com/science/2017...

Roughly once a week, Nick Cave blogs about music, religion, grief, and the infernal state of world affairs through the medium of fan correspondence in his Red Hand Files newsletter. His meatier responses become news stories, and few have traveled so far, or with such fervor, as his 2023 diatribes eviscerating ChatGPT. First, that January, he portrayed a lyric “in the style of Nick Cave” as an omen of the apocalypse and “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human.” A few months later, Cave elaborated that any lyricists using artificial intelligence were “participating in [the] erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself.”

But that was before his friend Andrew Dominik made a music video for Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “Tupelo” featuring a floating AI Elvis. Dominik—a longtime Cave collaborator and the director of Blonde, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and One More Time With Feeling—had been at work on the video behind Cave’s back. Presented with the result on the song’s 40th anniversary, Cave decided it was “a soulful, moving, and entirely original retelling of ‘Tupelo,’ rich in mythos and a touching tribute to the great Elvis Presley.” Cave found that Dominik’s AI-animated photographs of Presley “had an uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead, and the crucifixion-resurrection images at the end were both shocking and deeply affecting.” He and his wife, Susie Cave, he added, “were blown away. As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften. To some extent, my mind was changed. ‘It’s a tool, like any other,’ said Andrew.”

Far from coming away from this religious experience with his tail between his legs, Cave emerged with a renewed understanding of his own brilliance. “I believe that the ability to change one’s mind is the very definition of strength,” he wrote. “We pursue the truth wherever it may lead, remaining flexible and humble enough to adjust our views as new evidence emerges, regardless of how uncomfortable that may feel. It is ultimately a form of resilience, not a sign of weakness. Rigidity breaks; flexibility endures.” Watch the video below.

I suspect we will see more and more of these little conversions re AI and art, kinda like how most grumpy rock dudes eventually recognized hip hop is legit art. But they may not all be as eloquent in their flip-flopping as Nick Cave is here. pitchfork.com/news/nick-ca...

The latest AI copyright bill is a TRAIN wreck! 🚂 Fair use is tied to the tracks and the content cartels are looming over it like Snidely Whiplash! OK, I'll stop, but here's our statement on this Very Bad bill:

Well that cuts The Lion King to about 10 minutes long

ah yeah the familiar whiplash of seeing a legacy media org cover something you're an actual expert in and realizing "oh if this is how badly they're fucking up this, how badly are they fucking up every other topic?"

He’s a friend of a friend; if you don’t get a better connection, lmk and I’ll get his info!

Alden Global Capital fails in its attempt to get its tentacles on The Dallas Morning News A late bid to disrupt its sale to Hearst is foiled by a fourth-generation newspaper owner turning down more money.

New by me —>

The vulturous hedge fund Alden Global Capital has been prevented from taking over @dallasnews.com — thanks to one final act of stewardship by the family that has run the paper for more than a century.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/alde...

Everyone is celebrating him for his (obviously wonderful) songs but I am also celebrating him for releasing all his works into the public domain and insisting he retained no copyrights over any of it.

Re:Create members were unanimous in our comments on copyright in the AI Action Plan: let fair use do it's thing. And the plan does just that. Here's a recap of what folks said:

Good lord, what a week in copyright and fair use! Hard to pick one thing to highlight, but we're really proud of this infographic, and seeing clearly how the two big AI cases are aligned on fair use is a great way to celebrate #fairusefriday: