A character kerfuffle is brewing in Fortnite (and beyond) over whether AI-generated characters in community-built IP can be copyrighted.  AI-generated art, at least so far, has been found to be non-copyrightable, but the legal status of human-conceived work built using AI remains a gray area.

On April 1^st, Epic Games launched skins based on Tung Tung Tung Sahar and Ballerina Cappuccina, licensing Tung Tung from a French firm, Mementum Labs.  Mementum “licensed” the characters from Indonesian TikToker Noxa, who “authored” the characters with a prompt containing cultural references. SpyderGames, who has used these characters in Roblox since last October says otherwise.  

The crux of the argument isn’t just about who used the characters first, but whether Noxa actually created a character or simply curated a prompt that the internet then turned into a meme.

I asked @Diana Williams, who’s been involved in big-media IP for years what she thought, and she likened it to the public outcry that happened when LeBron tried to trademark “Taco Tuesday”.  She also said that, “the public view is (that AI characters) are built on stolen copyrights”… and that the courts need to define how much input it takes to “grant the copyright designation.”

This is a classic example of technology outpacing the law, with millions of dollars in skin revenue at stake. Epic is going out on a limb by picking a side, but the outcome could change everything for creators. If Mementum wins, “brainrot” becomes a corporate asset like SpongeBob or Donald Duck. If they lose, these characters remain free for the entire internet to use without limitations. And Epic’s licensed skins could technically become an unauthorized use of public domain assets.

I think there’s real value here for creators to build in and around these community-built worlds.  But make sure you have a good copyright attorney on hand just in case. (Gamesbeat)

Canva rolled out a huge product update last week, essentially flipping the company from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools. It’s not just marketing hype… they’re now in an entirely different business.

The move makes sense for them. Canva already delivers innovative AI tools, including the ability to layerize AI-generated images, letting users move individual elements rather than regenerating the image for every little change. New features add conversational design, agentic editing that produces an entire multi-channel campaign from a single prompt, persistent memory, and connectors to popular productivity tools.

Canva is already the top app on both Claude and ChatGPT. But there’s a big difference between being the top add-on and running a full AI platform. Now they’re competing with Adobe, Microsoft, and Google… plus the foundation model companies themselves.

Thirteen years ago, Canva launched with a goal of democratizing design, making it cheap and available to anyone. Today’s 265 million monthly users show how well they delivered. Now they want to do the same for creativity and AI… and reach a billion monthly users. If they pull it off, it could become an extraordinary tool for creators. That’s a long way from the scrappy Australian startup that originally wanted to build the “Canvas Chef.” (The Verge)

Take this with a colorful grain of salt. Three days with Phish at Vegas’ Sphere will do things to a person. But I’m convinced we’re watching a new medium get invented, but nobody’s figured out what it is yet.  What I saw was amazing, but what’s interesting here is the blank canvas of potential.

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter pointed a camera at a moving train and broke the first rule of early film: stop shooting stage plays. Directors had been setting up cameras where the audience sat, filming theater, and calling it movies. Porter figured out the camera could go anywhere. It took 20 years before anyone really understood what that meant.

Phish and the Sphere’s Wizard of Oz production are Porter. They’re the first artists to realize that the venue can be more than just a glorified glowing orb. Most others just treated it as a bigger screen.  Dead & Company got closer, but turned repetitive instead of pushing “Furthur”. Phish, on their second run, wove hilarious and unsettling narratives through and across the music, which many fans described as a genuine leap during their 2026 residence. Oz leaned into its original DNA to transform the physical space into celebration of color and light. Both teased out the essence of something new, but both still feel incomplete.

What exactly is this medium? A concert is communal ritual built around music. Stage plays embrace live storytelling. The Sphere is… somewhere in between the three, but “hybrid” probably isn’t right either. Hybrids don’t usually begat new mediums. Film isn’t illustrated radio, nor is it a stage play on steroids. A Sphere-native format is waiting to be discovered.

VR promised shared presence at scale and mostly delivered isolation with a headset on your face. Gorilla Tag and Second Life proved people want to inhabit virtual spaces together. The Sphere delivers a shared presence without strapping anything to your skull, feels communal but lacks interactivity. 

It’s not going to stay a Vegas oddity. A smaller 4,000-seat Sphere is already under development in DC near the MGM, and a larger one is under construction in Abu Dhabi. The underlying hardware is NVIDIA-powered and advancing fast. What looks like a special snowflake today will become a persistent and scalable format.  If there’s a new media to be found, it’ll happen when the sphere concept expands, tools get cheaper and off-the-shelf hardware catches up.  

The true auteurs of this format are probably home with grandma right now, waiting for their hippie parents to fly back from the Vegas shows.

CREATORS ARE THE NEW SOCIAL LAYER: Only 18% the people in your social feed are people you know.  And most of the rest are creators.  Which means brands are underpaying for the only authentic content layer left. Directional, but shocking. (IPPR)

THE NEW IDIOT BOX: About 90% of teens use Snap, TikTok or Instagram to be entertained according to a new study from Pew.   The study also explores other ways teens use social platforms, along with how it makes them feel.  (Pew)

100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!) and AI was very lightly used for editing.

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