AI: Copyright infringement a concern for anime and comic artists

You’ve probably received an email from Meta stating their new privacy policy with regards to the expansion of AI at Meta service. The changes will take effect on 26 June 2024. Meta says: “To help bring these experiences to you, we’ll now rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests for using your information to develop and improve AI at Meta.”

If you don’t like Meta scraping your content for their AI to appropriate, you can object to it. Creators such as Alison Sampson and Frisson Comics – established names in the UK comic scene – have announced that they will avoid publishing original arts on Instagram because of this. They’ve gone over to Cara, a social and portfolio platform for artists.

Alison Sampson (pictured, left) and Tom Smith of Frisson Comics (pictured, right). Sampson and Frisson Comics recently announced that they won’t be sharing their artworks on Instagram due to the new privacy policy update by Meta, which allows the possibility of user images being used for AI services. Images: ©Story Of Books

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The European Centre for Digital Rights has filed a complaint against Meta, on behalf of 11 countries in Europe. Citing GDPR infringement, the organisation stated: “Meta’s new privacy policy basically says that the company wants to take all public and non-public user data that it has collected since 2007 and use it for any undefined type of current and future ‘artificial intelligence technology’”. The plan to acquire our copyright or intellectual property this way is already unnerving. Meta users would like to know how the data is going to be used.

In a special investigation, Nikkei Asia discovered 90,000 anime images on AI image-sharing websites, generated using copyrighted images of popular anime characters. The newspaper said it’s a cause for worry, given that anime is “the gasoline in Japan’s soft power engine”. The internet, Nikkei Asia discovered, is awash with plagiarised characters of Pikachu, Tanjiro Kamado, Yuji Itadori, Denji and Eren Yaeger.

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FOMO drives economic behaviours

World Scientific, a Singaporean academic publisher, has published a book called Kiasunomics, looking at Singaporean’s economic behaviours. To define loosely, kiasu – derived from the Hokkien root word meaning ‘afraid to lose’ – is a type of social anxiety and arrogance that encapsulate FOMO (fear of missing out), one-upmanship and Asian envy – the extreme resentment directed at other Asians perceived of having a greater sense of freedom and achievement.

The book is available as hardcover, softcover and e-book. Visit the publisher’s website for details.

The book was written by three academics of business, finance and marketing at the National University of Singapore (NUS): Sumit Agarwal, Swee Hoon Ang and Tien Foo Sing. Framed within the context of economics, the book illustrates how one’s class, marriage compatibility and social aspiration influence economic decisions. The NUS ranks eighth in the QS World University Rankings 2025 released in June this year.

Of course, this phenomenon is well known in anthropology. French anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bordieu wrote a celebrated book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, which looks at individuals’ taste in culture, education and consumption – what he describes as ‘habitus’. When the Editor of Story Of Books was an anthropology student at University College London, our tutor Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture, described Bourdieu’s book as such: “You fall in love with someone by the type of socks they wear”. Which means that love doesn’t necessarily come at first sight. Most likely, it comes after some deliberation and calculation on the judgement of taste of the person you fancy.

Bordieu’s *Distinction* illustrates the demarcation of judgement of taste in culture, such as preferences in books, the arts, fashion and so on, through a rigorous ethnography supported by empirical evidence. Image source: *Routledge / Amazon*

The book illustrates how one’s class, marriage compatibility and social aspiration influence economic decisions.

Cyber-attack on British Library: read the official report

Thank you to Dr Matt Voigts, publisher of Copyright Newsletter for highlighting this. In March 2024, the British published a report on the cyber-attack that happened in October 2023. The paper, Learning Lessons from the Cyber-Attack: British Library cyber incident review (8 March 2024), can be downloaded from their website. The paper aims “to understand key factors that may help libraries, peer institutions and other organisations to learn lessons from the British Library’s experiences since the attackers first struck”.

The 18-page document details the timeline of when and how the attack took place, of suspected reconnaissance prior to the ransomware attack on Saturday, 28 October 2023. The attackers stole 600GB of files including data of library users and staff. This isn’t nice because they’d include members of the public who use local if not university libraries.

The British Library says: “Our major software systems cannot be brought back in their pre-attack form, either because they are no longer supported by the vendor or because they will not function on the new secure infrastructure that is currently being rolled out. This includes our main library services platform, which supports services ranging from cataloguing and ingest of non-print legal deposit (NPLD) material to collection access and inter-library loan.”

The library is now making the necessary improvements in anticipation of future attacks.

More on the British Library on Story Of Books

Godzilla Minus One drops quietly on Netflix across Asia

Godzilla Minus One is finally shown in Asia via Netflix. Image source: *Godzilla Minus One / Toho Co., Ltd.*

After a much-discussed absence of Godzilla Minus One in Asia, the Oscar-winning film finally dropped on Netflix across Asia on Saturday, 1 June 2024. Surprised Asians who watched the film channel applauded it for its cinematic excellence. Despite its controversial six-month absence from Asian cinemas, no objections were observed on the film’s post-war retelling. The controversy was in film producer Toho’s decision of not releasing it in cinemas in Asia, not in the reaction of the Asian audience.

We watched the film with our family. None of the members – old or young – found Godzilla Minus One offensive. Instead, they found it intriguing. No hate for Toho. They did a cool job. We remember the enthusiasm for the film at MCM Comic Con London in October 2023. Asian fans were pleased by the reception it received outside Asia and were looking forward to watching the film locally. It would have made millions more had the film been shown at cinemas across Asia. That’s the opinion of Godzilla fans in Asia.