In today’s CMU Daily: Triller is BACK! Just in time for Halloween. And this time it’s deadly serious about being the biggest app of all time and wiping the floor with every other feeble app out there. TikTok doesn’t have its own Bare Knuckle Fighting championship, does it? Oh and it’s got a new CEO too

Also today: Thousands of creators from across the creative industries have endorsed a statement saying that AI companies which train their models with existing content without getting permission first are posing an “unjust threat” to the livelihoods of people working in those sectors

Plus: After Morrissey and Johnny Marr had a public set-to about the trademark THE SMITHS, Dorothea Thompson of Bray & Krais takes a look at the ins and outs of trademark registration and how to sort things out, in the latest CMU op-ed

Triller brings in former VEVO exec to kickstart “transformation journey” as vertical video’s poor cousin licks its lips at prospect of TikTok ban

Short form video platform Triller has appointed former VEVO exec Kevin McGurn as its new CEO as the company kickstarts what it calls a “transformation journey” - something that, frankly, it could probably do with. Particularly if, in the event of TikTok being banned in the US, it’s hoping to swoop in and pick up the pieces, something that many analysts see as a possibility. 

After a few years in the wilderness, Triller shot back to attention earlier this year courtesy of some wildly complex stock market manouevres that saw it complete a reverse merger with AGBA, a NASDAQ-listed company that touted itself as “the leading one-stop financial supermarket in Hong Kong” or a “market-leading personal ‘wealth and health’ platform company in the Greater Bay Areas of south China”, depending on which press release you read. 

AGBA had initially set itself up as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, listing on  NASDAQ in 2019, before gobbling up fintech and healthcare management company TAG in late 2022. 

Triller is a lot more than just an app for sharing funny cat videos and blurry clips of people injuring themselves in amusing ways. In fact, according to its own spin, it’s a “leading global AI-powered technology platform that facilitates the interaction between ‘Creators’ including influencers, artists, and athletes, top global brands and users” and has literally millions of users. 

So many users, in fact, that in the summer of 2020 it claimed to be the number one ranking app “in all categories in the app store in 50 countries including the US, Australia, France, Great Britain, Italy, and almost every major country in which it is available”, adding that it ranked ahead of “Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat and every other app”. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! 

Only trouble was various market intelligence services said the numbers didn’t stack up...

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1000+ music creators back statement calling unlicensed AI training “major, unjust threat to livelihood”

Over 15,000 creators - more than 1000 of whom are music creators, including musicians like Thom Yorke, Nitin Sawhney and Aurora - have endorsed a short statement demanding that AI companies must get permission before using existing content to train generative AI models. 

That statement reads, “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted”. 

Creators - and organisations across the creative industries - are now being encouraged to sign the statement via a bespoke website. 

It has all been organised by Ed Newton Rex, the former VP Of Audio at Stability AI, who resigned from the company saying that he disagreed with Stability’s stance that AI training is ‘fair use’ under American copyright law, meaning existing content can be used without getting permission from creators and copyright owners. 

He has since become very outspoken against that position, which is taken by many AI companies, and has set up the organisation Fairly Trained to verify and showcase AI companies which only train their models using content where they have secured copyright owner permission. 

Setting out why he believes AI companies must get permission before using existing content as training data, Newton-Rex told The Guardian, “There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free”.

“When AI companies call this ‘training data’, they dehumanise it”, he added. “What we’re talking about is people’s work – their writing, their art, their music”. 

That said, there also remains disagreement within the music community...

Op-ed: Dorothea Thompson of Bray & Krais on the Morrissey + Marr trademark tensions

In a recent website post, former The Smiths frontman Morrissey claimed that ex-bandmate Johnny Marr had registered THE SMITHS as a trademark – “without any consultation to Morrissey, and without allowing Morrissey the standard opportunity of ‘objection’”.  He also claimed that the registration meant Marr could (amongst other things) tour “as The Smiths using the vocalist of his choice”. 

Marr responded that Morrissey’s claims were “incorrect” and stated that the application arose in response to a third-party trying to use The Smiths’ name – which led to the “discovery that the trade mark was not owned by the band”.  Marr says he reached out to Morrisey’s representatives to work together to protect the name but did not receive a response.  In an apparent further twist, Morrissey published a one-line announcement that he has since “severed all connections” with his managers at Red Light / Pete Galli Management.

This recent Morrissey/Marr tussle may come as little surprise to their fans or the wider music industry.  Nevertheless, it serves as a pertinent reminder that artists should keep branding and trademarks on the agenda – particularly those operating as a group.

Many have questioned whether THE SMITHS should have been registered as a trademark some time ago (and before 2018 when the application was actually filed). That would certainly have been advisable – and the process should have fully considered who would own and control the mark, who would be entitled to use it and how.  For some artists, however, those questions take time to work through. In the meantime, to monitor the position Marr and/or Morrissey could have setup one or more trademark “watches” to alert them if anyone tried to register the name (or similar). 

One key point is that trademark registration in most countries operates on a “first to file” basis. In most territories, registries do not assess whether the person applying is entitled to own that mark or is the first one to use it. Rather, they leave it for others to object (by way of “opposition”) if they think they have the right to do so. If no one objects within the fixed opposition period, the registration is granted. 

Morrissey suggested that he...