Gordon Firemark: Entertainment Law, AI, and Protecting Creators on the Virtual Sessions 7/27/23

Gordon Firemark: Entertainment Law, AI, and Protecting Creators

In this informative Virtual Session, The DJ Sessions host Darran Bruce sits down with Los Angeles-based attorney Gordon Firemark, known as “The Podcast Lawyer,” to explore the intersection of entertainment law, technology, and creative industries. Gordon shares his journey from working in theatrical sound and lighting to studying theater, film, and eventually law, where he built a career representing creators and helping them navigate the complex world of contracts, copyrights, and trademarks.

 

The conversation addresses the ongoing strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, focusing on critical issues like residuals in the streaming era, data transparency, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape for both writers and performers. Gordon explains the risks of AI-generated scripts replacing writers, as well as producers scanning actors for perpetual digital reuse without proper compensation.

 

Beyond industry disputes, Gordon offers insights into practical tools he has developed for creators, including his Podcast Blog and New Media Producers Legal Survival Guide and customizable contract templates. He underscores the importance of forming LLCs or corporations to protect creatives from liability, as well as obtaining insurance to safeguard against high-risk claims.

 

The discussion also touches on trademark battles like “Taco Tuesday,” the concept of genericide in brand law, and his own experiences podcasting since 2009. Gordon emphasizes that contracts act as “good fences,” keeping relationships professional and disputes manageable.

 

With his depth of expertise and accessible teaching, Gordon Firemark provides creators with the knowledge they need to protect their art, their businesses, and their futures in an evolving digital landscape.

 

Show Notes – Host: Darran Bruce
Guest: Gordon Firemark
Location: Virtual Studios, Seattle WA & Los Angeles, CA

 

Overview:
Darran Bruce speaks with entertainment attorney Gordon Firemark about streaming, AI, contracts, trademarks, and the essential legal protections every creator should know.

Topics Covered:

• Gordon’s background in theater, film, and transition into entertainment law
• Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes – residuals, transparency, and fair pay
• AI concerns: scripts written by machines and digital scans of actors
• The importance of contracts, copyrights, and trademarks for creators
• Insights from his Podcast Blog and New Media Producers Legal Survival Guide
• Trademark disputes including the “Taco Tuesday” controversy and genericide
• Why creators should form LLCs or corporations for liability protection
• The role of insurance in protecting DJs, producers, and podcasters
• Legal forms and templates for contracts, guest releases, and sponsorships
• His long-running podcast Entertainment Law Update and Legit Podcast Pro
• Advice for DJs and creatives facing promoters who delay or withhold payment
• The role of NDAs, idea submissions, and balancing trust in the industry
• Perspectives on AI’s role in music creation and legal copyrightability

Call to Action:
Visit gordonfiremark.com for legal resources, guides, and templates tailored to creators.
Discover more exclusive interviews and live sessions at thedjsessions.com

[Darran]
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the DJ Sessions presents the virtual sessions. I’m your host Darran and right now I’m sitting in the virtual studio up in Seattle, Washington and on the other end we have Gordon Firemark attorney-at-law. How you doing today Gordon?

[Gordon Firemark]
I’m good Darran, it’s great to see you again, nice to be here, thanks for having me.

[Darran]
Yeah, I was going over your bio before the show doing a little research on you. You’ve been in the industry like from the ground up and then got into law, correct?

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah, that’s true. I got involved in theatrical sound and lighting when I was in high school and actually even earlier than that but that sort of led me into college where I studied theater first and then moved into radio TV and film and law school reared its ugly head only after I had graduated from college and was working in the television business when the Writers Guild went on strike, kind of reminiscent of what’s going on in the world today.

[Darran]
Definitely wanted to kind of talk with you a little bit about that. I was reading up on the follow-ups today, just looking at some different websites, just researching that and seeing, they call it, both of them, is it WAG and SAG?

[Gordon Firemark]
WGA is the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA is the Actors and Performers.

[Darran]
Yeah, but both of them are striking, aren’t they?

[Gordon Firemark]
That’s right, yeah.

[Darran]
It’s never been done before, that’s never happened, they say.

[Gordon Firemark]
I think it was one other time, you know, 50 years ago or something, we were both out at the same time.

[Darran]
That’s what I think it said, 65 years ago or something like that. That’s just crazy. What’s the tension like down there?

You’re in LA, aren’t you?

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah, yeah. You know, you don’t see the tension on the streets day to day unless you’re going into or out of the movie studios or something like that, but you definitely see the picketers from time to time when you buzz by those places and, you know, they are upset about, obviously, pay wages and rates of pay, but also about, you know, streaming has become the new way we consume our content and the owners of the streaming services, they really don’t like sharing data with the creators that are part of their production, so you don’t know how many times are they watching that rerun or is something showing. In television, you used to be able to track reruns. You can’t do that with streams and because there’s some compensation that’s tied to that secondary performances of shows and things, the actors and the writers, both squads, want access to some more information so they can figure out what they should be getting.

Yeah. Residuals is the term, that’s for those payments and, you know, as streaming has come in, the amount of residuals has really dropped off precipitously to the point where, you know, some of these creators can’t afford to feed themselves just on what they make in that and so I promise you don’t want the star of your movie to have to go to their job and serve coffee as a barista in the evenings, you know, but anyway, so that’s one of the big issues.

[Darran]
That was one of the biggest things when we first started doing my podcast series back in 2005, you know, we got prominently placed on the front page of the Apple podcast section in the videos content section. Yeah. We debuted at like number 48 and then ended up climbing up to position 23 but all of us in that whole section there, it was a whole brand new thing because the video iPod had just come out and the questions we couldn’t answer because there were no Neilson ratings or Arbitron ratings or any way to measure that.

You could say, okay, this file, this is how much data was transferred. You can’t tell how long somebody watched a show for if they watched it for two minutes or 30 minutes if they watched the whole thing.

[Gordon Firemark]
I mean, in those days it was still a download of the content so you could tell whether it was downloaded. The stream, again, you can’t tell how long they watch. Now that the streamers actually do know how long you watch, they just don’t want to tell anybody.

[Darran]
Yeah, I’ve definitely put some traction on Netflix over the over the years watching shows that I watched probably religiously every once or twice a year. So where is your take on AI and all of this? Is that a major point that they’re discussing as well?

[Gordon Firemark]
It is. It’s a very hot issue both for the writers and the actors. On the writers side, they’re very worried that tools like ChatGPT will be developed or are being developed and will be used essentially to put writers out of work.

If a producer can say, I’ve got a great idea for a show, it’s got these characters and here’s what goes on, write me a script where Johnny falls down a well and lastly saves him, you know, next thing you know you’ve got actors performing in script. There was no writing involved, no screenwriter involved. So the Writers Guild wants to make sure that there is employment for writers and that in the television world where there used to be a writers room of 10 or 12 people, that it’ll still be a reasonable number of people working and not one person and an AI computer.

That’s the writers side. On the actors side, the concern is, hey, if we can digitize the actors images and the sound of their voice, well, we don’t need to hire them the second time or the third or the fourth and we don’t need to pay them residuals for work that they didn’t actually do and so the producers have floated some proposals that seem to be pointed in the direction of that kind of, once we scan you, we own you and we can do anything we want and the actors of course are, no, that’s not how we want to do things and so that’s a big issue.

[Darran]
Yeah, and I was reading up somewhere if they’re an extra, they can use their digital image and likeness forever and ever and ever and ever. You sign away that right and then they don’t really need to hire extras anymore.

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, exactly right.

[Darran]
Or as many extras.

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, yeah, hire you once and put you in 12 different costumes and all of a sudden you’re the crowd of people back there. That’s one possibility. It’s not just the extras.

I mean, the producers seem to be saying we want to be able to negotiate this in all of our contracts and the performers are saying no, we don’t want even that to be a possibility because, you know, when it comes down to the bargaining power, if you’re confronted with that, what are you going to do? Are you going to just say no and not take the job? So they want to make sure it’s just sort of forbidden all together or nearly all together, so.

[Darran]
And tell us a little bit about the legal survival guide and why is it important for people to read it?

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, my book is called The Podcast Blog and New Media Producers Legal Survival Guide, and I wrote it quite some time now ago as sort of scratching my own itch. I needed to figure out where does the law differ in podcasting and digital media from the more traditional film, theater, television, music arenas. And so I sat down and was doing the research and I thought, well, I’ll turn this into a little book.

And it’s an e-book that I put out and it’s available for folks who are creating stuff in this space. It shares information with them about business structures and whether you need an LLC or a corporation for what you’re doing and whether you, how copyrights work, you know, how you become to be an owner of a copyright, but also how you go about using other people’s copyrighted material. Talks about trademarks, talks about defamation, libel and slander.

Really, the goal was to sort of arm creators with the basic knowledge of knowing when to ask a question, basically. And it’s available at podcastlawbook.com.

[Darran]
You know, it’s so funny you bring that up. 23 years ago to the date, I worked on a broadcast pilot talk show series. And I don’t know, I talked to you about this last time, but I quickly was a, I was an over glorified production assistant that quickly became an associate producer.

And so I went to Barnes and Noble and picked out two books. I think one was the business of television. And it was, there’s another big, thick one, too.

Big, big, thick book. And, and I went to my producer at the time, I said, Hey, everything in these books are telling me we got to get some stuff on pen and paper, you know, because we could produce this whole series and then be cut out from it. Or we get no points or you know, he’s going to take our work that’s going to pay us nickels and dimes for and then go pitch it to the studios and we’re the one that launched that series, we should have some say in this.

And the guy I was working with at the time I actually stopped working with is still my best friend known for 30 years. But you know, it was like, everywhere was contract, contract, contract, you know, and putting everything down on pen and paper. And that’s where I first learned about sync rights and master use rights for music.

And all that stuff. Like I was I was so funny. So I would we were doing a shoot over one of the Seattle supersonics is house.

He wasn’t talking to the press, he’s getting fined like $25,000 a day or something for not talking to the press or something like that. And Shane, the guy who was the host of this series, knew him because he drove on he had a limousine company. And so he got this exclusive interview with Vin Baker from the Seattle supersonics.

But there was not supposed to be one basketball question asked in the interview. Yeah, so you know, it’s really interesting. But one of the things I remember that I did is we had Sprite cans on the countertops.

And I go, I’m not giving Sprite free advertising to put gaff tape on all the cans, right? You know, and I’ve done that with like, certain DJ equipment manufacturers, they their attitude is, we’re already in every photograph, why don’t we don’t need to sponsor? And I’m like, right, okay, great.

And so that was kind of interesting. But here’s something I read on your site, too. And this is the title, I believe it’s influencers, could you be liable for trademark infringement?

California court says yes, elaborate on that.

[Gordon Firemark]
Oh, well, that’s interesting. I’m not remembering the specifics of the case in question. But yeah, you know, if you are out there disseminating a message that creates a deception or a false impression that there’s a relationship or an endorsement or something like that with a brand.

Yeah, you could be infringing that brands trademarks. You know, if you certainly if you call your show the Coca Cola cast or something like that. But yeah, there’s a handful of other scenarios where influencers really need to be careful that they’re not saying in the let’s say it’s a someone’s doing, you know, promotional message about a particular product.

And they say, Yeah, this is just like brand x only better. Well, you may or may not have violated the rules there. So it’s really important to kind of know the parameters.

[Darran]
Yeah, it was a 2018. I went back, I had an issue with a DJ. And what had happened is, I saw that there was an event where I told these people to go on event, right, and you can find our tickets there, just look up the DJ session.

Yeah. And well, lo and behold, this this bar pops up down in about 40 miles from where I live. And there was a guy who went by the name DJ sessions, but he spelled it d e j ay sessions.

But on the calendar for the nightclub, they put the letter D in the letter J sessions. So I reached out to him, he didn’t get back to me. And so I go, Wait a second, he doesn’t control the bars website.

So why don’t I? Why don’t I call the bar and see if it’s just a typo, because I don’t want anyone taking my name and using it. I had somebody do this once before too, with with the DJ sessions.

They call their event the DJ sessions. I said, You need to take that down right now or I’ll send you a cease and desist.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah.

[Darran]
And so it was this whole little battle thing that we did online. The guy tried putting me on blast and talking mad crazy about me. And that’s when I just said, Screw it.

I went and trademarked the name DJ sessions.

[Gordon Firemark]
And truthfully, that sound alike with the d e j ay is still an infringement of your, because it sounds just like it. There’s going to be confusion.

[Darran]
Yeah, exactly. And that’s what I was, that’s what kind of concerned me. So after talking, I can’t remember who I talked with, but because he was using it almost like a few months before we started the show, the DJ sessions, we can’t, I can’t go after him or send him for a cease and desist.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah. First, first to get to the marketplace gets to keep it basically.

[Darran]
But moving forward, I know that I’m protected and I did see somebody that like, um, we already have a company where this is this, this, this, here’s our, here’s our business tax information or, you know, our EIN to prove that we’re a company. And here’s the trademark. I think it was 50 bucks for like five years or something like that.

I think it’s coming around for recording for renewal now that I think about it, because I did it in 2018. So here’s a question about forming a company and filing for an LLC or corporation. What’s so important about that as a, as a creator?

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, you know, having a company structure can serve a lot of purposes for any kind of an enterprise. Um, I think that if you’re in the creative businesses, you’re taking some risks that are inherent in the fact of, you know, you’re making content, you’re, you’re talking about people, you’re talking about brands, all these kinds of things we’ve already talked about, and you might be infringing a copyright or a trademark without really knowing and so on. So liability protection, one, one of the things about an LLC, which stands for limited liability company, is that it shields its owners, the members of the company from personal liability for things that happen in the business.

So that’s the main reason that we lawyers recommend creators starting a company. There are other reasons you want to have a structure as between the various owners of the company, who’s in charge of what who gets how much those kinds of things, what are the rights and responsibilities. But in that regard, it acts sort of like a prenup between the parties.

It can have tax advantages, you know, companies can take deductions for things that ordinary humans can’t. And and then there’s some street cred. And you can also if you need to, you can sell shares of a company, membership interests or shares of stock to raise funds for the company to capitalize it.

So lots of good reasons to do it that have to be outweighed or that have to be weighed against the cost of creating and operating the thing.

[Darran]
Yeah, no, I mean, I’ve told people this for years, just go. I mean, in Washington State, it’s only $300 or $325 to file for an LLC. And you know, if a DJ is out there, and they’re playing a show, or somebody trips on the equipment and knocks it on their foot.

And we’re, we’re, I think we’re a tribe, a tribe, you can sue three people in the same claim or something.

[Gordon Firemark]
I can’t remember what that’s called, like, if you’ve got 27 people who are responsible, you could sue all 27.

[Darran]
Yeah.

[Gordon Firemark]
But yeah, that’s the kind of concern, you know, look, the LLC can be a help in that. But even more important in those situations is insurance. Because you want someone else to swoop in and just take over and hire the lawyers and do the defense in a situation like that.

[Darran]
But yeah, I was gonna ask you about how important is it for creative to get, you know, insurance, boy, the lawyer in me wants to say it’s tremendously important.

[Gordon Firemark]
And the pragmatic creator says, and it’s almost impossible to do at an affordable price. Yeah, once again, we’re balancing cost and benefit, that insurance can be really valuable. Now, if you’re a DJ, and you’re going out and doing setups and gigs, there are there are specific insurance policies that cover the slip and fall the copyrights, the trademarks, the defamation, this stuff is very high risk, very high cost, if you do infringe.

And so the policy premiums are accordingly high and often out of reach for creators. It’s all function of budget.

[Darran]
So I saw something else on your site that I was reading today. Tell me about Taco Tuesday and the complications surrounding the use of it. Because that kind of I didn’t I thought that was just generic open term.

[Gordon Firemark]
So that’s what a lot of people thought. And that’s actually what Taco Bell and LeBron James thought eventually. So the backstory is that a number of years ago, a bar in New Jersey started calling its Tuesday night promotion Taco Tuesday.

And they claimed copyright trademark ownership at the same time or so I don’t exactly know the details. But this other outfit in I think, Iowa, named Taco John’s started doing promotions called Taco Tuesday. And they were they and they registered a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

And it went through and it was valid. It was, you know, whatever. But it became so widely used by others not and not policed by these owners of the trademarks that the position became well, everybody’s already using it.

Why should we Taco Bell be at risk that you’re going to sue us when you’ve basically let everybody else in the world do it. So they went out and and started making noise about this. And LeBron, who is a I guess a taco lover.

And I guess he’s a spokesman for Taco Bell or something. He got involved in this as well. And they filed a petition with the court or the trademark office to cancel that trademark.

And as of earlier this week, or maybe last week, Taco John’s the bigger one that controls 49 of the 50 states, they have settled the case. Well, they’ve just agreed not to respond to the case and that it’ll be dismissed as between them. And they’re going to give up their trademark.

The guy in New Jersey seems to be putting up a fight, but we’ll see how long that goes on. I think that it’s you know, one of the rules about trademarks is when you own a brand, you have to do what you can to protect and police it against all infringers or else at some point you are held to have lost your rights.

[Darran]
So yeah, that’s that’s huge. And then, you know, when it when it gets so big and widely used, does it does it ever become public domain or what would be the determining factor with somebody have to take it to court?

[Gordon Firemark]
There is this idea that you know, so to back up trademarks protect distinctive words and symbols and phrases marks that are distinctive and identify the source or origin of the goods. So you have a brand that that is recognizable as a as a secondary meaning to the consumer, they see that thing they know where it’s coming from. red triangle on a box of crackers tells you it’s coming from Nabisco, the Coca Cola logo, the Coca Cola swoosh, the Nike swoosh, excuse me, the, the Amazon smile logo, all of these things are very distinctive marks.

A word can become so well known and widely used that it becomes generic. And that’s called generic side. So it back in the and there have been a few of these the word cellophane was originally a trademark, it is now a generic term for transparent cellulose wrapping material, escalator for moving staircases, aspirin, for that particular kind of acetylsalicylic acid compound.

And so it’s very important that trademark owners do their best to make sure they don’t run afoul of this generic side. So you have brands like bandaid, or, or Kleenex that have to worry about this, because it’s you need a tissue, you asked for Kleenex, right? You need a adhesive bandage, you asked for bandit.

In the 80s, Xerox did an advertising campaign. Basically, if the machine doesn’t say Xerox, what you’re holding is a photocopy. You know, there’s a really funny I commend it to you.

If you are interested in this stuff at all, head over to YouTube and search Velcro lawyers. And you’ll find there are two music videos that the Velcro legal team have put together to talk about, you know, it’s it’s hook and loop unless it’s made by us and then it’s Velcro. Hook and loop fasteners, the generic term Velcro is the brand name.

And they’re very they’re being cautious not to lose control of that distinctiveness.

[Darran]
I do remember hearing about rollerblade was another one. Yeah, they got so widely used that you just you bought your rollerblades, but they could be Bauer or they could be K2 or yeah, rollerblade lost their market share.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah. And the generic term was inline skates. Yeah.

And rollerblade I think rollerblade managed to pull the bacon out of the fire a little bit. But you know that it hurts. It’s hard to recover from those kinds of things.

[Darran]
Yeah. And speaking about legal stuff, the podcast law forms, I saw that on your website as well. Can we talk a little bit about that and tell us what that is?

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll back up a little bit. I’ll just my mission as a lawyer in this and in this industry, entertainment and media law as the podcast lawyer is to help creators protect themselves and have their influence and income and and achieve the kind of impact that they want. And I recognize, you know, as a lawyer, I’m done for you.

People hire me to do things for them. But I recognize that there’s this whole other category of folks who can’t or won’t hire a lawyer for whatever reason, usually economic, but other reasons as well. But they still know that they’ve got to get some of these legal things done.

And I want to make them I wanted to make them tools that would allow that to happen. So I’ve created a bunch of legal forms and templates for the creative community, mostly podcasters, but YouTubers and video creators can use this stuff too. And you can go in there and either buy a bundle of my legal forms or buy them a la carte for, I think, very affordable prices.

And if you need a contract for a videographer who’s going to shoot with you one day, there’s something there for you. If you want to hire a co host for your show, something there for you that that way as well. And for the folks that are sort of in the middle who want those forms and templates, but also feel like they want a little more instruction and coaching on how to make it happen.

I have a whole course called easy legal for podcasters that really teaches you everything you need to know about forming that entity, registering your copyrights and trademarks, bringing on onboarding your team, so you make sure you own everything you think you own. That podcast prenup I referred to a little earlier and, and the deals with your with your sponsors and advertisers if that’s how you’re monetizing. So everything for everybody is my goal.

[Darran]
You know, that’s awesome. You bring that up. You mentioned also that you do a podcast series.

You’re known as a podcast lawyer. Um, why is doing an important a podcast so important to you? And is there something for everyone out there?

It seems like after pandemic happened, everyone jumped online.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah. Um, I, I’ve been podcasting since 2009. I started with my show entertainment law update.

Uh, just earlier today we recorded our 150 ninth monthly episode. So we’ve been at it for a long time. Yeah.

Um, and that show is really about me and my cohost positioning ourselves as experts in the field of entertainment law. And we’re talking to other lawyers, mostly other entertainment lawyers with that show, really sharing details about what the courts have decided and what the rationales and reasonings were and what the ramifications will be going forward, those kinds of things. Um, and it’s been great marketing for us.

Uh, even though we’re talking to our competition, there’s a lot of referrals that happen because someone has a conflict or doesn’t understand a particular issue as well or whatever. And so my cohost and I have benefited greatly from that. And we keep doing the show, um, until we can’t anymore.

The other show that I do is called legit podcast pro, and it’s really targeted at the creator community where each Thursday afternoon I do it as a live stream on Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn, but then I record it and, and it’s saved as a, as an audio podcast as well. Just a, you know, a 10 or 15 minute, one topic, one tip for creators on what they need to know about protecting themselves. Again, more of that free content and stuff.

And again, that’s positions me as the expert, as a helper and, um, builds goodwill, gets people thinking about when they need a lawyer, they think about me instead of that other guy down the street.

[Darran]
It’s funny you bring that up because, um, I was doing the live streaming. I started live streaming in 2000. I was podcast.

We still podcast, but we started live streaming in 2009. And, uh, everyone knew me around Seattle, around the town because we’re mostly local stuff as the live streaming guy, the guy who’s been doing this for so long. So when Pandy hit, my phone just rang off the hook.

My emails were flooding. Everyone’s like, what kind of cameras do I get? What do this?

How come Facebook can’t pay the cost for the music and license it? They got billions of dollars. You know, I’m answering these questions.

I’m like, Oh my gosh, you know, people go, go get a book, go get a book. This is where I would direct them to would be your book and, and, and, and your law forms go because some people just in LA, I’m sure it’s a common thing. You’d get a contract.

You might have an entertainment attorney, the lawyer that looks it over for you. Yeah, hopefully. Um, but here in, up in Washington, we’re not a heavy entertainment market up here.

So when I present like a personal release form to somebody and they don’t understand, yes, I need to get this form because if I don’t get a form from you, I can spend all this money on production. And then you come back and say, Nope, take that down.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah.

[Darran]
Or I’m taking you to court. And I’m like, I just did thousands of dollars with the work, all my editing time, putting all this together. And then I’ve only had one person, maybe two people in my past.

Um, there was a girl once, she says, I didn’t like the way my makeup looked. And I’m like, okay, before we recorded the yeah, right. And then and then there was one time where DJ is like, I didn’t like that set.

Can you take that episode down? Like, Oh, interesting.

[Gordon Firemark]
You know, I mean, you know, the nice thing about having the contract having a release form that sign and that’s one of my crusades is everybody should have a every guest should sign a piece of paper. I call it safe guest kind of like safe sex, use it every time or else. But the nice thing about having that document is then it puts the decision in your hands, you aren’t going to be held up by the extortion of if you don’t do it, I’m going to take you to court.

Because you say go ahead, I’ve got a contract. But you still can take it down if you if it’s the right thing to do. If her makeup really was a botched mess, you could take it down or the the set was bad or there was something in the set that shouldn’t have been it, you know, it gives you flexibility, it gives you ownership and authority over these things.

And that’s what’s really important as a creator.

[Darran]
Yeah, I think I have five different agreements that I have my my resident DJ sign. I have like a non disclosure. Don’t tell anyone about our company information.

I have a code of conduct agreement. Yeah, you know, that’s so it’s all there in black and white. If somebody says you didn’t live up to your part there.

And so yeah, that’s why I go it was right there in black and white. It told you what was going to happen. It told you how you get terminated.

If you know, there’s a service agreement in there. I think there’s a limited liability waiver form in there. We do some kind of crazy stuff.

[Gordon Firemark]
You know, the saying goes good fences make good neighbors. And I would say that good contracts make good business associates as well.

[Darran]
Yeah, I’ve been using. Yeah, I’ve been using these forms since 2000. Yeah, they’re they’re pretty, pretty standard to read and pretty industry.

I think they should be industry standard. You know, you get a lot of DJs in the music biz, they get screwed over by producers, not produced by by promoters, you know, that don’t pay them or don’t pay them on time or, you know, they have to drag tooth and nail to get 150 bucks that they were owed 100 bucks that they were owed. And it’s almost at that point, you’ve spent 10 hours on it, you just made 10 bucks an hour, you know, right.

And so it’s, it’s funny, because some people will shy away from agreements, because they don’t want to be held liable. And if I ever, if I said, here’s my contract, and so he says, I’m not signing that I had somebody I actually pitched a, I had to put them out, I wanted to put them under NDA, because I was going to pitch him my idea for a show. And he goes, Tell me your idea for my show.

And he ran a production company. I’m like, sign my NDA.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah.

[Darran]
No, I’m not gonna let you come up pitch a show to you. And then you say, Hey, that’s really good. Let’s go make the show.

[Gordon Firemark]
Right.

[Darran]
Oh, that would happen.

[Gordon Firemark]
That’s actually an interesting catch 22 in the entertainment industry. Because yeah, a lot of creators are afraid to share their information with the producers, because the producers might steal it. And the producers are afraid to accept it without some kind of a release or the inverse of an NDA.

Really, it’s a promise that I’m not going to sue you if you do use what I present to you. And so yeah, there’s just a lot of that back and forth. NDAs are uncommon.

They’re more common nowadays than they were 2030 years ago, but they’re still pretty uncommon in the idea submission arena. Because, you know, there are so many ideas out there, and everybody’s just tossing them around.

[Darran]
And now AI is going to be tossing all those ideas around.

[Gordon Firemark]
Oh, yeah, game changer.

[Darran]
I mean, I played with I played with chat GPT once I said, write me a bio for Darran Bruce, the executive producer of the DJ sessions. It was 98% spot on accurate.

[Gordon Firemark]
Oh, that’s interesting.

[Darran]
The only thing that I didn’t, it wasn’t true is that it said I owned a record label. I was just one little bird and owns a record label. And I don’t know where they would pull that information from because nowhere says owning a record label.

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, these tools hallucinate, they make it up.

[Darran]
Yeah.

[Gordon Firemark]
I will tell you that I had the opposite experience. I asked it to write a Wikipedia entry about me. And it got my college, my law school, where I live, my age, and my credentials basically wrong, better than they actually are in some ways.

And so I don’t, I don’t have a lot of trust for the tools, I will say that I use them and and I’ve, you know, you can train them and make it better. But there have been a number of situations where that hallucination has been a problem there. There are a couple lawsuits going on right now.

Just on my podcast today, we were talking about one where two people with basically the same name, one uses middle name and the other doesn’t. The the plaintiff in the case is is this person who is a professor and author and an artist. And the other person was actually convicted of assisting the Taliban.

And they were conflated into one person in this report from it was being if you search this name, you would get you know how they do that some renowned that’s not just links to existing articles. And it just got it wrong said that they were one in the same person. Yeah, so who do you sue is the next question.

So this guy’s suing Microsoft claiming, hey, you made this machine, you set it in motion, it got it wrong, it harmed my reputation. It’s still up there. It’s been months since I told you, take it down.

And Microsoft, you know, they’ve got their legal defenses to bring forward, but it’s gonna be interesting to see what happens.

[Darran]
Yeah, I remember, I don’t think it was, it wouldn’t chat GPT. But I was in school a few years ago. And my teacher was teaching a business class.

And we got into the Microsoft Office suite product that, you know, go in the cloud. And it has all like the 20 different things you got in there. There was one in there.

He said, Watch this, I’m gonna type in like, typed in like, airplane book report, something. And it went out and made a whole presentation on airplanes, grab text that put the text in there to grab links, put the links in there, grab photos and put it just like you hit the button, it compiles the whole thing for you. And I don’t know if that was like the beginning of AI or the first grants.

[Gordon Firemark]
I can’t Yeah, this tech has been brewing and cooking for a few years now. And I, you know, a few years ago, I remember using a similar tool to create a PowerPoint presentation for a class I was going to teach and, you know, worked out okay, not great. And, you know, it’s good, just getting better.

The trouble is when it gets to be indistinguishable from human input. And actually, if you another fun one is if you go search for Johnny Cash, Barbie girl, you can hear Johnny singing Barbie girl, and Johnny ain’t alive anymore. He did not record it, but it sure sounds like him.

[Darran]
That’s crazy. I was just gonna bring that up about music. You know, if I want to become a music producer, I could say, Okay, I want music created.

I want it to be four minutes long. I want it to be an ambient down, chill beat. And I’ve talked to a lot of producers about this.

And the one thing that you’re not going to get is soul.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah.

[Darran]
You know, the soul, the soul of the musician in there, even even. Yeah, you know, the soul in the music, you’re not going to get that. But you could, how would you know if somebody’s just sitting there and they’re ghostwriting a song for somebody, and they just put it through AI and said, Here’s the song.

And here’s, here’s, go, go put it into logic and or Ableton, and you can manipulate change it around. But this song was really created by a computer.

[Gordon Firemark]
Yeah, these tools are really amazingly powerful. And I think the soul is you’re right, there is no ghost in the machine. So the soul is the thing that’s missing.

And hopefully we as humans, we have to detect it most of the time. But boy, it it’s getting tighter and tighter, narrower gaps between what you can tell and what you can’t. I’ll tell you the in the law trying to catch up or keep up with this kind of stuff.

There have been a lot of issues around whether the material that comes out of the, the AI machine is copyrightable in the courts and the and the copyright office here in the States at least seem to be saying no, the AI generated stuff, you need to be have a human author, if it’s not human authored, it’s not protectable. So then we get into well, how much effort and creativity went into crafting the prompt that generated the thing. And, you know, and assembling it and all that.

So use these tools to your detriment. If you you know, let’s say you use one to write the lyrics for a song about who knows what, you may not be able to stop anybody else from using those same lyrics in their song.

[Darran]
Yeah, I think there was a I saw a TED talk and there was these two guys that they were talking kind of music theory and saying how all the melodies out there are like copyright and owned by this person known by that person, they made them.

[Gordon Firemark]
And then they took all the ones that because there’s only so many arrangements of notes that we put in a certain order, a finite number, if you have 12 notes in the in the chromatic scale, and you can only combine it a certain number of ways.

[Darran]
Yeah, and they wouldn’t actually, I think they put out there on the copy, right, the free copyright website. Yeah, they, they, they got it, they applied for it, and they put it in and made it for you. But it’s all mismatched.

People want. But yeah, it was kind of interesting. But hey, Gordon, we’re gonna wrap up here.

Is there anything else you want to let our DJ sessions fans know about?

[Gordon Firemark]
Well, I think we thank you for the opportunity to share about my book and my form site websites and all that really everything. The clearinghouse for everything is my website at Gordon firemark.com. That’s where everything that isn’t my direct done for you legal services stuff is found.

And come check it out and see if there’s something there that serves you. And feel free to reach out if there’s not. And if you need something special that I might be able to help with, I’d be delighted to know.

[Darran]
Are you able to practice? I know some states when you pass the bar, you’re able to practice law in those states. Is California one of those states?

[Gordon Firemark]
So California? No, you mostly it’s licensed state by state. There are a few states that have reciprocal relationships, for one reason or another.

But I’m licensed in the state of California, I’m licensed in the federal courts were nationwide. So as long as it has some nexus with the areas of law that are that touch the federal system, copyrights, trademarks, patents, or that has a nexus with the state of California, like the company you’re doing business with the, the entities are located here or something. I can help you out.

[Darran]
So awesome. Well, again, Gordon, pleasure having you on the show. Always, always fun.

And always learn stuff. So we’ll let you get going here. And I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

[Gordon Firemark]
Thanks for having me. Good to see you.

[Darran]
Welcome. Yeah. Don’t forget to go to our website, the DJ sessions.com.

Find us on Facebook meta threads. I haven’t even got down to that one yet. Another social media platform, Instagram, Tick Tock, we’re out there the DJ sessions.com.

Make sure you get those contracts signed. And remember on the DJ sessions, the music never stops.