California lawmakers are continuing to promote a bill that will reinforce the power of giant AI companies by burying small AI companies and non-commercial developers in red tape, copyright demands and potentially, lawsuits. After several amendments, the bill hasn’t improved much, and in some ways has actually gotten worse. If A.B. 412 is passed, it will make California’s economy less innovative, and less competitive.  The Bill Threatens Small Tech Companies A.B. 412 masquerades as a transparency bill, but it’s actually a government-mandated “reading list” that will allow rights holders to file a new type of lawsuit in state court, even as the federal courts continue to assess whether and how federal copyright law applies to the development of generative AI technologies.  The bill would require developers—even two-person startups— to keep lists of training materials that are “registered, pre-registered or indexed” with the U.S. Copyright Office, and help rights holders create digital ‘fingerprints’ of those works—a technical task with no established standards and no realistic path for small teams to follow. Even if it were limited to registered copyrighted material, that’s a monumental task, as we explained last month when we examined the earlier text of A.B. 412.  The bill’s amendments have made compliance even harder, since it now requires technologists to go beyond copyrighted material and somehow identify “pre-registered” copyrights. The amended bill also has new requirements that demand technologists document and keep track of when they look at works that aren’t copyrighted but are subject to exclusive rights, such as pre-1972 sound recordings—rights that, not coincidentally, are primarily controlled by large entertainment companies.  The penalties for noncompliance are steep—up to $1,000 per day per violation—putting small developers at enormous financial risk even for accidental lapses. The goal of this list is clear: for big content companies to more easily file lawsuits against software developers, big and small. And for most AI developers, the burden will be crushing. Under A.B. 412, a two-person startup building an open-source chatbot, or an indie developer fine-tuning a language model for disability access, would face the same compliance burdens as Google or Meta.  Reading and Analyzing The Open Web Is Not a Crime  It’s critical to remember that AI training is very likely protected by fair use under U.S. copyright law—a point that’s still being worked out in the courts. The idea that we should preempt that process with sweeping state regulation is not just premature; it’s dangerous. It’s also worth noting that copyright is governed by federal law. Federal courts are already working to define the boundaries of fair use and copyright in the AI context—the California legislature should let them do their job. A.B. 412 tries to create a state-level regulatory scheme in an area that belongs in federal hands—a risky legal overreach that could further complicate an already unsettled policy space. A.B. 412 is a solution in search of a problem. The courthouse doors are far from closed to content owners who want to dispute the use of their copyrighted works. There are multiple high-profile litigations over the copyright status of AI training works that are working their way through trial courts and appeal courts right now.  Scope Creep Rather than narrowing its focus to make compliance more realistic, the latest amendments to A.B. 412 actually expand the scope of covered works. The bill now demands documentation of obscure categories of content like pre-1972 sound recordings. These recordings have rights that are often murky, and largely controlled by major media companies. The bill also adds “preregistered” and indexed works to its coverage. Preregistration, designed to help entertainment companies punish unauthorized copying even before commercial release, expands the universe of content that developers must track—without offering any meaningful help to small creators.  A Moat Serving Big Tech Ironically, the companies that will benefit most from A.B. 412 are the very same large tech firms that lawmakers often claim they want to regulate. Big companies can hire teams of lawyers and compliance officers to handle these requirements. Small developers? They’re more likely to shut down, sell out, or never enter the field in the first place. This bill doesn’t create a fairer marketplace. It builds a regulatory moat around the incumbents, locking out new competitors and ensuring that only a handful of companies have the resources to develop advanced AI systems. Truly innovative technology often comes from unknown or small companies, but A.B. 412 threatens to turn California—and anyone who does business there—into a fortress where only the biggest players survive. A Lopsided Bill  A.B. 412 is becoming an increasingly extreme and one-sided piece of legislation. It’s a maximalist wishlist for legacy rights-holders, delivered at the expense of small developers and the public. The result will be less competition, less innovation, and fewer choices for consumers—not more protection for creators. This new version does close a few loopholes, and expands the period for AI developers to respond to copyright demands from 7 days to 30 days. But it seriously fails to close others: for instance, the exemption for noncommercial development applies only to work done “exclusively for noncommercial academic or governmental” institutions. That still leaves a huge window to sue hobbyists and independent researchers who don’t have university or government jobs.  While the bill nominally exempts developers who use only public or developer-owned data, that’s a carve-out with no practical value. Like a search engine, nearly every meaningful AI system relies on mixed sources — and developers can’t realistically track the copyright status of them all. At its core, A.B. 412 is a flawed bill that would harm the whole U.S. tech ecosystem. Lawmakers should be advancing policies that protect privacy, promote competition, and ensure that innovation benefits the public—not just a handful of entrenched interests. If you’re a California resident, now is the time to speak out. Tell your legislators that A.B. 412 will hurt small companies, help big tech, and lock California’s economy in the past.

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Want to know how the music business treats artists? Just look at how they treated Hank Williams Jr. Bocephus was country music royalty, somebody the music industry was quick to want to exploit after the death of his legendary father Hank Williams. But the problem was they wanted him to be just like his father – in both his music and his personal struggles. Hank Jr. has admitted that he struggled growing up in his late father’s shadow, with the people around him expecting him to play Hank Williams songs instead of forging his own path in the music business. He first hit the industry when he was 8-years-old and started recording for MGM at fourteen. And when he first started out, it was his own idea to play his father’s hits. But as he matured, the desire to branch off and make his own music grew. He wanted to be his own artist, and not just the son of Hank Williams. And it was a fistfight to ever get to do his own thing, something that likely swelled the Hank rebelliousness we know today. Hank described this musical transition in a 1982 interview with David Letterman: “It was fun for the little boy to do Hank Williams, but it was hell for the man.” But that pressure to be like his father extended far beyond his music. Hank Williams had a long history of struggles with drugs and alcohol, much of it due to his lifelong battle with spina bifida that was exacerbated by a fall from a bull when he was around the age of 18. His addictions led to Williams being kicked out of the Grand Ole Opry, and a number of missed shows and drunken performances led to further issues with his career. Even Hank Sr.’s friends at the time, like the legendary Minnie Pearl, saw the toll that his destructive path was causing, recalling a time when she had urged him to sing his song “I Saw The Light.” “All of a sudden he stopped and looked at me…and he said, ‘But that’s just it, Minnie. There ain’t no light.'” And while Hank had hoped to mount a comeback in 1953, unfortunately his addiction would ultimately take his life before he was able to get his legendary career back on track. It’s not a path that any artist should want to take – but according to Hank Williams Jr., early in his career he was told that it was the only way for him to be a success. During a 1987 interview with ABC’s 20/20, Bocephus discussed the pressures that he faced early in his career to follow the same destructive path as his father. According to Hank Jr., people thought that his dad’s songs were so great because of all that he had been through – and that the only way for his son to become a success was to go through the same struggles with booze, pills and depression that had ultimately claimed his father’s life. “It was always, ‘Your daddy went through this stuff. You’ll have to go through it. We have to go through these things.’ Depression, you know that’s a big sport to a lot of people I think. It was just drilled into me a lot.” And Bocephus admits that he was headed down the same path, ending up in the hospital several times, after musicians began giving “little Hank Jr.” alcohol at the age of 10 while out on the road: “Oh yeah, I was in the hospital several times…all the way out. The pills and the whiskey and the whole thing. I was really rolling in it. I thought I was going to die a couple times, and that scared the heck out of me.” At one point though, it got so bad that Hank even decided to end it all, going away into a cabin in Alabama with a bottle of pills that he said “looked like a mayonnaise jar.” Obviously the suicide attempt failed, and Hank said that he then spoke with a doctor who snapped him back to reality: “He said, ‘Let me just lay it out there for you. You’ve been taught from the time you can possibly remember to look like, act like, be like, everything exactly like your legendary father.’ He said, ‘They’ve done a d-mn good job.’ He said, ‘And you’re going to beat him because he died at 29. You’re going to die at 26.’” Hank Jr. eventually found the freedom to become his own artist – and his own man – cultivating the outlaw reputation that he’s known for through songs like “Family Tradition,” “Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound,” and of course, “A Country Boy Can Survive.” He’s also embraced his legendary father though, recording his own versions of some of the biggest Hank Williams songs like “There’s A Tear In My Beer,” “Move It On Over” and “Kaw-Liga.” And it all happened after he was no longer being forced to try to replace his legendary father – both in his music and his life. Unfortunately it seems to be a pressure that still exists in the music industry today, even from fans. Artists who choose to get sober and take control of their own lives have to deal with comments from fans that their “music was better when they were on drugs” or that they’re not the same artist anymore. Of course country music is built on authenticity, and the legends like Hank Sr., Waylon, Merle and George Jones certainly lived the stories in their songs. But that doesn’t mean that artists should be encouraged to go down a destructive path in order to improve their art. Luckily, Hank Jr. was able to avoid the fate of his father, despite the pressure that he faced from the industry. The post Hank Williams Jr. Was Told He Would Have To Go Through Addiction & Depression To Become As Great As His Father first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

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