Volume 2, Issue 6
We have a nice short, pre-Fourth of July read for you with some Fender and IndieWeek coverage. I would say it’s short and sweet, but it might be more short and salty.
How Fender is ‘under the radar’ right now
I know y’all are dying to hear more about Fender. About how they might be after the PRS Silver Sky after all. And how the CEO is handling it…um…nope. Not doing that.
You know what got buried in all this Stratgate hubbub? Fender has quietly been building out its audio business, acquiring PreSonus, and releasing high-end consumer gear. And now we have the first release of Fender Studio Pro 8.1 with Moises generative AI integrated. And it looks really good. And Moises respects artists enough to pay them for training material. Folks, this is actually really good news!
You know what else it means? No walled garden. Music you create there can be exported and distributed. Yes, there could be copyright and other issues relative to generative AI content—I’m not going to get into that here. But as you will soon see, it’s not that you can’t have AI in a copyright; there are plenty of copyrights out there today for works developed with AI.
So, you know, I don’t know where the whole S-style thing is going to end up, but if you can push the image of Fender as the evil competitor out of your mind for a few minutes, Sped Spedding’s story of the Moises integration shows a much better side of them. And the Moises integration.
IW2026: Shira Perlmutter
I attended IndieWeek this month, and the standout talk at the conference, for me at least, was Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. Register of Copyrights, in a fireside chat with A2IM COO Lisa Hresko.
Perlmutter talks about an agency that is functioning and moving through its agenda. What a refreshing thing to hear about a government agency! They are working with Congress on legislation, putting new policies out for public comment, and quietly assigning copyrights to works containing AI. How many? Over 7,000 as of the conference.
In addition, she talked about the NO FAKES act and the CLEAR act, both of which deserve some attention. First, the NO FAKES act, which stands for Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe and is definitely NOT a convoluted and confusing name. I have a lot of strong feelings about that. Someone should write a musical about a support group for the unsung heroes who have to come up with bill names and then live with them being in the media for years afterward. We could hear their stories in stagecraft and song!
Anyway, it is a bipartisan act that protects individuals from unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes by giving you ownership over your voice and visual likeness. And when I say bipartisan, I am not kidding. It’s not like six of one party and all of the opposing party. I mean, Adam Schiff and Katie Britt agree on this! Anyway, to be fair, critics say that it goes too far and can be used to attack free speech by attacking parody or sarcasm, so you have to do your own due diligence. Having said that, it is supported by Democratic creators in Hollywood and Republican privacy advocates alike, which is kind of amazing and so rare right now.
Even better, since IndieWeek, this bill was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee by a unanimous vote. It still has hurdles. It needs full votes in both chambers, House/Senate alignment, presidential signing, etc. But this is one to keep an eye on.
The CLEAR act, on the other hand, faces a longer battle. CLEAR stands for Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting Act. It should really be CLEAIR, but nobody wants to market around that. It’s just ironic that the word they dropped was the ‘I’.
Anyway. The CLEAR Act is less bipartisan than NO FAKES but more than your typical bill. It mandates that companies need to provide a list of the copyrighted works they used to create generative models, which seems simple but doesn’t end up that way. For one, many companies consider these works to be trade secrets or protected intellectual property and don’t want to disclose them. On top of that, this issue is being litigated in numerous large and complex lawsuits (looking at you Suno, Udio, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others). Nobody wants to commit to a framework with the thought that an ongoing case might suddenly change everything, especially if it goes up to the Supreme Court. And passing the bill shouldn’t enable a flurry of lawsuits, but this bill does apply retroactively. So it’s really complicated. Even Perlmutter has cautioned about this on the Hill when she has testified about it, if my memory of her talk serves correctly.
So this one isn’t even out of judiciary yet and doesn’t look like it’s going to move too fast, even though it is fundamentally important and has enough bipartisan support in theory to move.
IW2026: The Other Thing I Attended
There was one other session at IndieWeek that I attended that I really expected to write about, but something uniquely surreal happened, and now I can’t talk about it. Actually, I think I can talk a teeny bit about what happened, which was that 10 minutes into the session, one of the presenters (who is also a lawyer) told the audience that the session was off the record, among other restrictions. Now, I am not a journalist, but my understanding of “off the record” is that I can’t talk about it, write about it, or even hint at the information they presented. And I have to admit, I was pissed. I’ve never had that happen at a conference before, and it honestly left me with a terrible impression of all the participants in the session. There was not a way to dissent to this restriction, and I knew I would talk about it, so I left. I literally got up and walked out to demonstrate that I did not agree with being off the record at all. Personally, I don’t feel bound by that for the first 10 minutes before the announcement, but out of respect for the conference and the presenters, I’m not going to talk about anything that was said other than being sworn to secrecy. I’m also not going there because there is a massive power dynamic. When a lawyer gets up and says, “Don’t talk about it,” it has a chilling effect. At least, it did on me.
So I can’t believe I have to say this, but I want to remind the presenters that going to sessions and then talking about what we learned in them later is kinda what conferences are for. That means we want your actual, real opinion in a setting where you don’t have to worry about being sued by someone else, and I don’t have to be worried about being sued by you.
I hope A2IM takes this into consideration for next year. I think I can speak for most in saying that we attendees want speakers that are free to express their opinions, and then we want to talk about those opinions in the lobby bar over drinks. And we definitely don’t want anyone telling us to be careful about what we do with the information.
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