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“Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that,” Danish Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt recently told The Guardian after Denmark introduced an amendment to its copyright legislation so people could own their own likeness. “In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice, and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI.” The Danish culture minister is right. We need to stop this problem decisively. Deepfakes are a serious problemone that is fundamentally altering our perception of reality. People are getting bullied, coerced into doing things against their will, and even framed for crimes they didnt commit. Stopping the software will not work. That ship sailed a long time ago. And normal people dont have the resources to fight in court for a deepfake to be taken down. The answer, like the Danish government has done, is to include personal likeness in copyright law. The proposal establishes legal definitions for unauthorized digital reproductions, specifically targeting “very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice.” The Danish administration intends to introduce the legislative proposal for public input ahead of the summer parliamentary break, with formal submission planned for autumn. Under the revised copyright framework, Danish citizens would gain legal authority to request removal of nonconsensual deepfake content from digital platforms. The legislation extends protection to cover unauthorized artificial recreations of artistic performances, with potential financial remedies for victims. Creative works such as parody and satirical content remain exempt from these restrictions. “Of course this is new ground we are breaking, and if the platforms are not complying with that, we are willing to take additional steps,” Engel-Schmidt said. Digital platforms that fail to comply face substantial financial penalties, with potential escalation to European Commission oversight. “That is why I believe the tech platforms will take this very seriously indeed,” the minister added. Denmark plans to leverage its upcoming EU presidency to promote similar legislative approaches across European nations. Fix copyright to fix the deepfake problem If imposing heavy penalties on any social network or video service that hosts a copyrighted work sounds familiar, thats because it is how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) works in the United States. Under U.S. copyright law and similar systems globally, copyright protection is granted exclusively to original creative works fixed in a tangible form, such as writings, music, artwork, software, films, or photographs. Crucially, copyright law explicitly excludes protection for abstract concepts like ideas, facts, systems, methods, or short phrases, which may fall under trademark law but cant be copyrighted. Most importantly, it does not extend to fundamental aspects of an individual’s identity, including their likeness, voice, or persona. Copyright protects specific, authored expressionslike a particular photograph of you or a recording of your voice singing a songbut not the underlying person. Your face, body, or general identity can be reproduced, although there are rights concerning the commercial or personal use of one’s likeness, voice, or identity. They are addressed by separate legal doctrines, primarily the right of publicity and the right to privacy. The problem is that, to fight someone from using your likeness under that framework, you will need a lot of power and money. Someone like Scarlett Johansson could take down OpenAIs version of her voice because it sounded too much like her with a simple tweet and the threat of litigation. Likewise, the lawyers of famous people like President Obama or footballer Christiano Ronaldo can strike down any unsanctioned use of their likeness. “If Ronaldo complains about a deepfake video of him, a platform will take the video down, Metaphysic CEO Tom Graham told me in an interview last year talking about his companys efforts to copyright anonymous peoples likeness. “But if Joe Schmoe complains about his right of publicity or privacy, the platform will shrug. Unless Mr. Schmoe fires a DMCA complaint, that is. Then YouTube will take down the deepfake instantly, because not complying with a DMCA takedown notice will have serious consequences for YouTube that could reach millions of dollars.” Graham has been trying to fix this issue for a while. Metaphysic was the company that made deepfake Tom Cruise viral and then went on to work with iconic brands like ABBA, Tom Hanks, and Elvis himself, to make legal digital clones for use in concerts, movies, and TV. The last time I spoke with him, his company was working on a pioneering system that allowed famous people and individuals to register the copyright of AI-generated versions of themselves. “Copyright law says that you can’t copyright anything other than works of human authorship,” Graham explains. “So, you can’t copyright yourself because you are from nature, right? You are not a work of human authorship.” But what if you could use AI to create a digital self and copyright that? That will effectively give you right over any digital representation of yourself, potentially putting you under DMCA protection without the Danish copyright patch. “What we’re doing here is we are creating the AI character of you. So, just like Disney can own Mickey Mouse and the Avatar characters, you can own the character that happens to look exactly, perfectly like you,” he told me. The process involves creating an AI-generated avatar from user-provided video, which becomes a copyrightable work because it’s technically an artificial creation, even though it looks identical to the real person. “If somebody takes a video of you in real life, you don’t have any claim. But if someone makes a character that looks just like you, that looks exactly like your character, then we are trying to say that that unauthorized character infringes your character,” Graham described. “So, you’re not copywriting yourself. You’re copywriting this AI character of yourself.” In theory, this would give people instant practical enforcement benefits. Under current takedown procedures, when someone with registered copyright complains about infringing content, platforms must remove it withn 24 hours. “That’s the remedy. That’s the thing you’re looking to do,” Graham says. For deepfake victims, this creates a powerful tool. He already submitted his own AI likeness for copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office, though he’s still awaiting a decision. The process was designed specifically to address recent Copyright Office decisions that denied protection for AI-generated images from tools like Midjourney, which were deemed to lack sufficient human authorship. “We designed this system to embed that human control and authorship into every layer of the process. Just the same as if you were using Photoshop to design a new character,” Graham explains. The system requires users to manually curate their video data and select specific frames, creating what Graham argues is sufficient human involvement to qualify for copyright protection. If that sounds convoluted to you, you are not wrong. Denmark’s legislative approach offers a more direct path than the complex workarounds required in countries like the United States. By explicitly granting individuals rights over their digital likeness, the Danish law could provide the legal foundation needed to effectively combat deepfake abuse. Whether the European Union follows Denmark’s lead may determine how quickly this new form of digital rights protection spreads across the world, hopefully changing the mind of U.S. legislators in the process.
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E-Commerce
The Velvet Sundown is the most-talked-about band of the moment, but not for the reason you might expect. The “indie rock band,” which has gained more than 634,000 Spotify listeners in just a few weeks, has spoken out in response to accusations that the group is AI-generated. The suspicions first surfaced on Reddit last week, where users discussed the band’s sudden appearance in their Discovery Weekly playlists on Spotify. The Velvet Sundown exhibits several common indicators of AI involvement: eerie, uncanny-valley-style images, a now-deleted fabricated Billboard quote in its Spotify bio, and virtually no internet presence prior to last month. As the speculation picked up media attention, an X account claiming to represent the band responded to the rumors: Absolutely crazy that so-called journalists keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is AI-generated with zero evidence. The post went on to read: This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul. Every chord, every lyric, every mistake HUMAN. Adding to the confusion, the X account that posted the denial is not the one linked from the band’s official Spotify page. In other words, multiple social media profiles appear to be representing the band, all of them claiming to be official. When Fast Company reached out to the X account that first posted last week, an apparent spokesperson for the band tried to clarify the situation. There are a couple Twitter accounts floating around because different members have been responding in different ways, the spokesperson wrote in an email to Fast Company. Were a collective, and not everyone agrees on how to handle the attention. They added that the ambiguity is part of the story and is helping to get people curious about diving down the rabbit hole. They also admitted to having used some AI tools in the process, mostly for press visuals and experimenting with aesthetic ideas. Still, they insisted, the core of this has always been about human musicianship. According to its Spotify bio, the Velvet Sundown is a four-piece consisting of singer and mellotron player Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, Milo Rains, who crafts the bands textured synth sounds, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar. The band maintains that its two full-length albums are written, played, and produced by real people, adding, No generative audio tools. The textures and glitches that people point to as proof are just from lo-fi gear, weird mic setups, tape loops, that sort of thing. Whether AI is involved or not, the controversy highlights the growing conversation around generative AI in the music industry. Deezer, a streaming service that flags AI-generated music, recently reported receiving more than 20,000 fully AI-created tracks per day. The Velvet Sundown, for its part, defends the artistic freedom to experiment. For us, this has always been about making strange, emotional music and exploring how to present it in interesting ways. It might not fit neatly into anyones expectations, but its honest to what were trying to do.
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E-Commerce
How the Boomer wealth transfer could reshape global finance. Born too late to ride the wave of postwar prosperity, but just early enough to watch the 2008 financial crisis decimate some of their first paychecks. Old enough to remember dial-up. Young enough to buy Bitcoin on their phones. Theyve lived through tech booms, housing busts, meme stocks, student debt, and five different definitions of “retirement planning.” Now, as trillions in wealth begin to change hands, this generation stands to serve as a bridge between old capital and new code, traditional finance and the blockchain future. If handled wisely, this moment wont just shape the portfolios of younger investorsit could reshape the architecture of global finance itself. The $46 Trillion Handoff Roughly $124 trillion in wealth is expected to pass from baby boomers to younger generations by 2048, with millennials set to inherit the largest share: approximately $46 trillion over the next two decades. While Gen X is expected to inherit slightly more than millennials in the next 10 years, by the 2040s, millennials will take over as the dominant inheritorsand primary stewards of global capital. This isnt just a generational milestone. Its a once-in-history opportunity to redefine how capital is allocated, what assets are prioritized, and what financial frameworks endure. Millennials arent inheriting a set playbooktheyre writing a new one. Digital Assets Have Grown Up The timing couldnt be more significant. After years of growing pains, the digital asset space is undergoing a profound transformation. Following the collapse of FTX in 2022, the ecosystem began maturing rapidly. By 2024, a major inflection point arrived: The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), marking a formal bridge between traditional finance and crypto. The ETFs shattered recordsunderscoring just how much pent-up demand existed among retail investors, registered investment advisers (RIAs), and institutions that had previously been locked out of the asset class. So far, nearly $41 billion has flowed into these products, a staggering figure for any ETF, let alone one tied to an asset recently dismissed as fringe. Additionally, North Americas crypto market is now dominated by large transfers over $1 millionabout 70% of transaction volumereflecting deep institutional involvement. And its not just about ETFs. Major institutions are integrating crypto into their offerings in tangible ways: Mastercard and Visa are experimenting with stablecoin settlements. Lyft is leveraging Hivemapper for road data. AT&T is offloading traffic onto the Heliu network. This isnt the Wild West anymore. Regulation is clarifying. Infrastructure is stabilizing. And serious capital is arriving. The Bridge Generation So, which generation is most naturally situated to carry digital assets into the financial mainstream? Not Gen Z (at least, not yet). While 42% of these young investors own cryptocurrency, only 11% have a retirement account, indicating a preference for immediate, high-risk investments over long-term financial planning. Not boomers, either, who have largely opted outjust 8% hold digital assets, while 64% have more traditional retirement accounts. Millennials, however, are fluent in both financial worlds. Theyre almost equally likely to invest in crypto as they are in retirement accounts36% own cryptocurrency, and 34% have retirement plans. They understand ETFs and decentralized finance, spreadsheets and stablecoins. They grew up with the internet and came of age during the 2008 crisis. Theyre old enough to remember the dot-com bust, young enough to see blockchains promise. In short: Millennials have a tech-native mindset and a healthy respect for risk. That balance matters. Surveys show that millennials are more comfortable investing in crypto than any older cohort. In fact, 62% of millennial ETF investors say they plan to allocate to crypto ETFs, making it the No. 1 asset class for that age group. And theyre not just speculating12% believe crypto is the best place to invest for long-term goals, compared to just 5% of boomers. This makes millennials uniquely qualified to shepherd digital assets out of their adolescence and into legitimacy. Market-Wide Impact As nearly $85 trillion moves into the hands of Gen X and millennials combined, every asset manager, RIA, and financial institution will be forced to adapt. Catering to these investors wont just mean better digital UX or TikTok explainers. Itll mean rethinking allocations, product offerings, and frameworks that may have, until recently, assumed digital assets are fringe. They are not. Not anymore. The generation that straddled Web2 and Web3 is about to call the shots. They speak the language of blockchain and the cadence of capital markets. That dual fluency will define the next phase of global investingand determine whether crypto becomes a credible pillar of the financial system or stalls as a misunderstood asset class, never realizing its broader potential. The opportunity isnt in betting on crypto. Its in building the institutions, tools, and strategies for a world where digital assets are simply part of the portfolio. And that world? Its coming faster than most expect.
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E-Commerce
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