// The Archive

EVERY SIGNAL

The full transmission log, newest first. Browse by register from the Signal nav, or by topic. Old frequencies stay live — we don't break URLs.

Licensing A tightly cropped overhead photograph of page nine of a printed legal contract lying…
Licensing · 5 min

AI Music Licensing Ethics: The Clauses That Actually Protect Artists

The clause sat on page nine of a production-library agreement, between the delivery specs and the credit language: the licensee could use delivered stems "for the development, training and improvement…

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Streaming A wide overhead photograph of a vast dim warehouse floor covered edge to edge…
Streaming · 5 min

AI Music Generation Economics: Where the "It Doesn't Pay" Consensus Breaks Down

The advice has been the same in every label strategy deck for a couple of years now: AI music is a volume problem, not a revenue problem.

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Licensing A dimly lit professional recording studio at dusk, empty except for a vintage analog…
Licensing · 10 min

Ninety Seconds: How AI Music Generation Actually Reaches Your Royalty Statement

Ninety seconds. That was the render time. I fed a prompt into an AI music generation tool on a Tuesday afternoon — 92 BPM, brushed kit, a detuned Juno pad underneath, melancholy but not sad — and…

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Licensing A wide, elegant editorial photograph of a heavy dark walnut conference table in a…
Licensing · 4 min

Anthropic Copyright Litigation, Compared: Three Cases, Three Theories of Harm

Ask a large language model to write something in the manner of a well-known songwriter, and you get one of two results.

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Ai Voice Close-up photograph of a professional recording studio mixing desk at night, hundreds of illuminated…
Ai Voice · 5 min

AI Voice Cloning Scams: A Sound Designer's Guide to the Call You Shouldn't Trust

The first time a cloned voice fooled me, I was sitting at my own mixing desk. A friend sent me eight seconds of a synthetic version of me as a joke — scraped from a podcast I'd done — saying a…

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Ai Music A tight overhead close-up of a vintage electric piano keyboard photographed on a cluttered…
Ai Music · 5 min

What Copyright Law Actually Protects When Two Tracks Sound Alike

The email had two attachments: a 48kHz WAV of a lo-fi beat, and a PDF of a cease-and-desist. The producer who sent it was sure he'd been robbed.

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Provenance A professional photojournalistic close-up of a cluttered developer workstation shot at eye level in…
Provenance · 6 min

The 26% Problem: AI Agents and Autonomy When Detection Barely Works

In July 2023, OpenAI quietly retired its own AI text detector. The classifier it had launched six months earlier correctly flagged about 26% of AI-written text as "likely AI-written," and it…

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Policy A photorealistic wide-angle photograph of a dim home recording studio at night, a single…
Policy · 5 min

AI-Generated Music Bans Aren't About Taste — They're About the Math

Last Tuesday I set a kitchen timer for sixty minutes and tried to bury my own hard drive. One text prompt after another, minor variations, no listening back beyond a few seconds to confirm the render…

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Royalties A dramatic overhead close-up of a vintage brass balance scale resting on a dark…
Royalties · 5 min

Fair Use Versus Mechanical Royalty Rates: When Does Reuse Owe You Nothing?

Nine-point-one cents. That was the statutory mechanical rate for a physical copy or a permanent download in the United States, frozen at that figure from 2006 until the Phonorecords III proceedings…

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Rights A photorealistic close-up photograph of a weathered brass door lock mounted on an aged…
Rights · 5 min

What AI Deepfake Detection Can and Can't Do About Scraping

A friend who scores mobile games sent me a link last spring: a thirty-second clip on a video app, a stranger's name in the corner, built around a vocal hook that was unmistakably hers — the same…

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