Justin Kaufman

More #videogamelaw talk! You now know why #Roblox’s autopay function doesn’t always work for buying and selling percentages in Roblox games.   Let’s start with some solutions to the “cost and expense” problem.   The cost and expense problem: autopay pays out all revenue, minus only Roblox platform fees. So you can’t use it for sharing profits.   Let’s say you have a partner, and you want to split all costs, revenues, etc.    If you set your partner on 50% autopay, they’re getting overpaid, since they’re not sharing in the costs.    They’re getting 50% of revenue (minus only Roblox fees), but not paying 50% of the other costs (like development and marketing costs).    A potential solution!   Instead of doing a 50/50 split, you agree to be responsible for all costs except #Roblox fees.    But to make that work, you have to adjust the autopay (revenue) split.   So, using our example, if you know that costs are going to be 10%, you would agree in advance to be set at 55% on autopay, and your partner would be set at 45%. So let’s say the game generates $100k in revenue a month. Autopay will pay you $55k (55%) and your partner $45k (45%). Since you are responsible for costs (10%), your share is reduced to $45k.   Voila! It still nets out to a 50/50 deal! But what if you don’t know what the costs are going to be? Using this solution, someone might get a windfall. For example, what if you agree to pay for costs because you think costs will be 10%, so you agree to set autopay at 55% (you) / 45% (your partner). But it turns out that costs are actually 25%. Now it is no longer a net 50/50 deal. Using the $100k revenue example, on autopay, you get $55k (55%) and your partner gets $45k (45%). But then you have to pay 25% for costs ($25k). Thus, you keep only $30k and your partner keeps $45k. Now its no longer a 50/50 deal. The reverse can also be true. If costs are less than projected, the partner taking on the costs could get a windfall. For example, you think costs are going to be 10%, the other partner agrees to pay those costs, so you agree to set autopay 55% (the cost-paying partner) / 45% (you). But it turns out costs are only 4%. Now that partner is making more money. He gets $55k (55% autopay) minus $4k (costs) so keeps $51k.  You only get $45k. One way to think of it is risk allocation. Who is going to take on the cost risk? And who is in the best position to assess that risk? One partner may know more about costs than the other. And also consider incentives. If one party has to pay all the costs, he’ll be incentivized to keep costs down.  That could be bad. Maybe he’ll skimp on development and marketing costs so he can pocket more money.   All of a sudden this solution doesn’t seem so great. Well, it could be good in some cases, but in others it might not work. So if this doesn’t work, what should you do? Tune in next time!   #Robloxlaw #RobloxDev #RBXDev #gamedev #indiegame #indiedev #IndieGameDev #MarkowitzHerbold

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The harsh reality of CA politics -- the state government works for Big Tech, not the citizens. Some good quotes here. Newsom's stated goal about workable "guardrails" is nonsensical as it's currently physically impossible. That's a bit like saying they are pursuing a way to apply DDT safely to agriculture.... no such method existed. Newsom and CA have zero cred on anything relating to responsible or safe AI. The question is whether that extends to Harris. I honestly don't know, but her history in defending SV and conflicting relationships that include her brother-in-law suggests that it would be difficult for her to regulate Big Tech objectively. Trump is also a wild card. He's so unpredictable that one day he might attempt to order Zuch arrested and the next brag about the power of American Big Tech. The next four years will be interesting. I have much more confidence in SCOTUS.

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A great example of how large language models act as a bridge between worlds 🌍 The ability to “translate the language” between real world and the digital world is becoming more and more accessible. We’re building something exciting that I hope will hit upon the underlying feeling I’ve always had in law - there’s so much red tape (rightly or wrongly) that I have to do when all I wanted is to help my client with their legal issue. At the moment the solution is to have humans do the monotonous, low value work. I think we’re far too valuable to be doing that, even with the nice digital tools that can help ease the pain. The ability for software to soon do it for us begs the question, what could we be doing with that time instead? Scott John Clee Matthew Dunne 👩🏻‍💻 Jenny Evgenia Grinblo Anastasia Semenova Nigel Clark Colin Bohanna #lawtech #aiinlaw #emmi

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TVW.org uses mimoLive® to semi-automatically run 20 concurrent live productions for the State of Washington with a staff of three. The magic sauce is mimoLive's HTTP API. Listen to Scott Freeman, who developed the back-end, describing how they got there. That is the power of software-based live production! I think this would be great for C-SPAN, Ahad B.! #governmentvideo #livevideoproduction

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$10-12m!!! That is the amount one person earned in royalties from using AI bots to inflate the number of plays his "music" achieved on streaming platforms. Not only were AI bots used, but AI was used to create the music in the first place! Also... can he even be classed as a musician?! The takeaway? Fraud is fraud people. Until there is specific AI laws, existing laws will be used to the fullest extent when it comes to AI - whether that be data protection, intellectual property or criminal law. If you want to know how to use AI from a legal perspective drop me a DM, or book onto my upcoming event on 24th September: https://lnkd.in/eY96t7zf I can't guarantee you'll come away with a $10-12m AI idea, but I can guarantee you'll get key insights into how to protect yourself, and your business.

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Nice highlight on Utah's tech cluster, aka Silicon Slopes. Not much silicon -- a lot of software, but a fine example of what can be done with persistent efforts, in this case beginning decades ago that I am aware of. My first business trip to SLC was in the 1980s and the potential was obvious. Interestingly, my first trip to NM was even earlier, and the potential was obvious here as well, but UT has done a much better job in diversification. In UT the LDS was a dominant feature, in some respects like the state in NM -- only game in town with deep pockets. UT was just much more business oriented and business friendly in their culture. The results speak for themselves. We covered UT in our VC firm during the 2000s (NM as well), during which time they were gaining momentum. Interestingly, UT is still under-served by local VCs when compared to the largest markets, though much healthier than NM. I hope UT never becomes like SV -- pricing locals out of the market, creating bubbles that require extreme predatory tactics to keep bubbles inflated, monopolistic behavior in tech giants, etc. Much better to learn from WA and CA's mistakes, and maintain a sustainable, diversified cluster with ongoing creative destruction and generational change in tech leadership.

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SB 1047 is a pending California law that is essentially outlawing large open source models. If you like open source (and I do!) this would be very bad. And now it is reported that one of the advocates of the bill is trying to cash in on it 🤦‍♂️ The bill technically doesn't outlaw large open source models, but it requires "PWC type audits" costing "on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars to single digit millions." As most open source authors or university research labs don't have that much money, it achieves the same outcome. It would also make AI start-ups vastly more difficult and expensive. The AI community (or at least the part of the AI community that likes open source) unsurprisingly are trying to stop it. Today, the article below reports that "Dan Hendrycks, an executive at Center for AI Safety — the firm whose lobbying arm helped draft the bill — co-founded a company called Gray Swan that offers AI safety compliance tools that seem positioned to provide the type of auditing data the bill would require". https://lnkd.in/gdutbeKq

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Join Bits of Signum, Creator Stories for an enlightening conversation with serial entrepreneur Le Zhang, Founder of Spaceport.xyz and ARK Investment Management LLC's Nicholas Grous - thanks to you both! Spaceport sits at the intersection of several areas of our exploration, namely #IPrights, #web3, #UGC, Roblox, Fortnite. https://lnkd.in/eFypjk99 Signum Growth Thesis:  We believe that IP rights protection will be baked into the technology at some point in the future. Currently, we are in a period of early experimentation, and we are seeing a lot of cool AI creations. We are also in a sea of IP rights infringements. The industries of video games and entertainment depend heavily on rights, which generate a lot of value - $350 billion referenced by Le Zhang in the podcast. Blockchain technology is uniquely suited to solve this problem. We are deep in the Polkadot ecosystem so please ask us about this. Bottom line: if we thought that Cambridge Analytica was scary, AI will take the level of fake news and inauthenticity to a national security threat level. Why wouldn’t we seek a cryptographic backing of truly authentic digital IP? Spaceport was started to build tools for brands and IP owners allowing them to license content legally, starting with Roblox and Fortnite UEFN. If a creator wants to build a game using Pikachu, they will be able to do this legally. Spaceport vision: to become the IP licensing layer of the metaverse, not just for UGC platforms, but all gaming applications, digital applications and even real world applications. Web3 technology tackles IP rights! We dove into a fun example of a physical Pachimari keychain ($5), valued lower than an identical digital version in Overwatch 2 ($10), a perfect demonstration of the evolving value of physical and digital items as we spend more time online. We wonder if this is the audience value? Finally, we touched on the ways in which DMCA takedowns are evolving, and stay tuned for Spaceport news on democratizing IP rights creation across Roblox and Fortnite! We hope you will listen in and let us know your thoughts? Thanks from me & the SGC team`> Keshav Holani, Eliza Jappinen, Karen Bader. Also, please subscribe to the Bits of Signum Substack and interact with us there! https://lnkd.in/eqANk5K5

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For an example of just how entitled the Big Tech culture has become -- and those who work for them, see their reaction to the CA legislation that holds LLM bot companies liable for the catastrophes they cause. Who else should be responsible? Well, they apparently think the government should provide a backstop for catastrophes (large and small) they create, presumably because they are so brilliant, valuable, and too-big-to-fail. I think the author of this article, Kelsey Piper, has it right. Companies training LLMs that cost $100 million or more (I would recommend including other metrics) are by definition commercializing a combination of high-risk technology and scale that causes catastrophic risks. Moreover, they are not only monetizing it, they have already created several $trillion in market cap by hyping the hell out of LLMs. So now they want to be immune from liability for their actions? To even suggest it and that some in Congress take it seriously demonstrates how far off the deep end U.S. governance of Big Techs has fallen. They could have gone down a very different path, like we did, and design-in safety and security from inception, but then our path has been much more difficult than the instant wealth created by the scorched earth approach. “If you don’t take reasonable precautions against enabling other people to cause mass harm, by eg failing to install reasonable safeguards in your dangerous products, you do have a ton of liability exposure!” Yale law professor Ketan Ramakrishnan responded to one such post by AI researcher Andrew Ng.

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I've met 14 year olders running WoW (World of Warcraft) top guilds. Running a guild means managing a group of about 200 people in a very organized and efficient way. This "CEO" or if you prefer (I do), Guild Master, is in charge of everything related to HR, Finances, Project Mangement, Strategy and surrounds herself with top C-Levels to help keeping this group on peek performance, everyday, in an extremely competitive and aggressive landscape. It's a game - yet it teaches invaluable real-world skills while being incredibly fun. Can you name another school that offers this level of practical education? #Leadership #GameDesign #Innovation #WorldofWarcraft #Education #Strategy #YouthLeadership #GamingIndustry https://lnkd.in/dpiJHup9?

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What legal options do the Anime Realms creators have now? As many know by now, the Anime Realms creators allege that they got scammed. They say that they signed a written contract to sell their game for $850,000. They transferred the game, but didn’t get payment. There are two paths forward. 1️⃣ The first path is to file a lawsuit for breach of contract. Under a breach of contract theory, the Anime Realms creators would be entitled to get what they expected to get under the deal. 💲 So if they prevail, they are awarded $850,000. 💲 2️⃣ The second path is file a lawsuit for fraud. Under a fraud theory, the Anime Realms creators could seek to unwind the deal entirely. So if they prevail, they get their game back. 👉 In other words, they can either be awarded the $850,000 they were promised, OR they get the game back, but they don’t get both. But which is the best way forward? I’ll cover that in another video. #roblox #markowitzherbold

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Have you ever wondered who Roblox is suing? There’s a case involving Roblox, Jazwares, LLC, Gamefam, and the Wowwee Group, pending in California.   Here’s what Roblox alleged happened:   Roblox owns the copyright and intellectual property in its avatars. 🧍‍♀️ 🧍‍♀️   📜 It contracts with Jazwares to make avatar dolls.   Here’s where it gets interesting.   The Wowwee Group developed a line of dolls called “My Avastars.”   They look a lot like Roblox’s copyrighted avatars and Jazware’s officially licensed Roblox dolls.   And the Wowwee Group was even marketing My Avastars in a way that suggested they are affiliated with Roblox.   🕹️ The Wowwee Group took it even a step further, partnered with Gamefam to create a My Avastars Roblox game.   When Roblox found out about My Avastars, it was pissed. 😡 It sent cease and desist letters to the Wowwee Group and Gamefam telling them to knock it off.   Gamefam, not surprisingly, right away agreed to stop development of the game. But the Wowwee Group didn’t stop making its My Avastars dolls. 😬   👨‍⚖️ So, Roblox and Jazwares sued the Wowwee Group in federal court in California. They alleged a battery of claims, including copyright and trademark infringement.   The case is scheduled for a ten day jury trial in December.   ❓ What do you think the jury will decide? Help me reach my goal of hitting 2.5k followers on LinkedIn before the end of the year by dropping a follow. #MarkowitzHerbold

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Interesting news out of Cheyenne, Wyoming! AI emerges as a mayoral candidate claiming it will make decisions without human input, sparking discussions on AI’s role in decision-making. At Parse AI, we advocate for AI as a teammate, not a replacement for expert decision-makers. Our platform empowers title agents and landmen to work efficiently while retaining the power to input and edit information as needed for accurate and accountable title reporting. The title expert makes the final decision. What are your thoughts on AI in the title industry? #AI #artificialintelligence #realestate #oilgas #renewables #energy #government #technology www.parseai.co

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This seems super useful.

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so here's my takeaway on WWDC2024 Hardware+Close System -> Privacy -> Standard - unifying all devices into interface for human-AI interaction (yes Continuity is my fav part - defining the privacy standard for edge-based llm apps as well as expection for workflow - inevitably morphing the infra of nearly all AI apps launching on iOS/macOS, locking up developers onto their standard and partners. - occupying the space with a whole collection of apps and features leveraging a hidden business model (maybe a boost in iCloud fee) yes it comes close to almost everyone's expectation. yes it's got features and designs to be improved and yes it is back in the game

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