Deepfakes, Privacy, and Deception

by Amanda McAllister and Navin Ramalingam

A “deepfake” is an ultrarealistic fake video made with artificial intelligence software. The term is a portmanteau of the concept of machine “deep learning” and the word “fake.” Essentially, it is the end-product of a computer program “learning” the map of the target subject’s face, finding common ground between two faces, and stitching one face over the other in a video editing process. 

Manipulating video is not necessarily a recent invention. Hollywood has been doing it many years, such as when film effects were used to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis in the film Looper, or the digital recreation of a young Carrie Fisher on actress Ingvild Deila for the Princess Leia cameo in Rogue One. Face-morphing features are also an essential part of multimedia messaging applications like Snapchat.

While the technology may not be inherently illegal or unethical, some manifestations of deepfakes do have the potential to be illegal, to create liability, to spread misinformation, or to violate the privacy of subjects of deepfakes.

For instance, people have been using facial recognition apps and deepfake technology to superimpose faces of well-known celebrities and ordinary people over that of actors in pornographic films or over nude photos to create nonconsensual pornography. The past year has seen several deepfake consumer apps being released permitting its users to create their own deepfakes, including one disturbing app that provided its users the opportunity to create nonconsensual pornography by “undress[ing] photos of women” and making them look “realistically nude.” Fortunately, this app has since been taken down.

Trade Secrets 101 for Startups

Whether your startup is high-tech, low-tech, a manufacturing company, or anything else, trade secret protections can help startups to grow, especially when other intellectual property options are not available. Startups may employ trade secrets in protecting their methods, for example, by shielding their internal operations and processes from public view and restricting access.

What is a trade secret? 

A “trade secret” broadly covers all forms of information for which the owner has taken reasonable measures to keep secret and that has independent economic value as a result of not being generally known. This could include confidential formulas, customer lists, manufacturing techniques, source code, algorithms, or any other type of financial, scientific, technical, engineering, or vital information that the startup takes affirmative steps to keep secret.

In other words, to own a trade secret, a startup must deliberately and affirmatively take measures to protect a trade secret and that trade secret must have economic value because it remains guarded and away from the public domain.

Why use trade secrets?

In their recent article, “Why Do Startups Use Trade Secrets?” David S. Levine and Ted Sichelman note three reasons why startups use trade secrets: 

1.  “to maintain lead-time advantage and prevent competition”;
2. when “patent protection is unavailable”; and
3. when “patent protection is too costly, weak, or difficult to enforce.”

In the first example, Levine and Sichelman use Google as an example of an early pioneer in online search engines. Google was able to start and maintain dominance in the field by “keeping key details of its search algorithms a trade secret.” This works for companies using novel technology that is not easily reverse engineered. If reverse engineering is a concern, patents or even copyrights (in the context of software) are likely to provide more robust protection than trade secrets.

So You Want to Bring Your Business to the Fair? An Insider’s Perspective on Vendor Life at The Great Minnesota Get-Together®

It’s the day after Labor Day, and we’ve just wrapped up our second year of business at the Minnesota State Fair in what seems likely to be a record-breaking year for attendance. Our St. Croix Saddlery booth had a successful run with a decent increase in sales over last year, attributable to the combination of more educated buying, an improved setup, a strong sales team, and fantastic weather. We learned a lot in our first year that made this year easier, but the Fair is still a big deal with its own challenges. I know many other entrepreneurs dream of joining the Fair as a vendor, and I thought I would share just a handful of truths that I’ve learned in my experience.

• It’s not a bonanza. We’ve all heard tales of the business owners who work two weeks at the Fair and get to retire the other 50 weeks of the year. Perhaps this is true for some of the most popular food vendors, but it’s certainly not the case for me or most other vendors. Our sales over 15 days at the Fair are roughly equivalent to one average month’s sales in our store, but there are a lot of expenses that go with that (see the next paragraph).
• It’s expensive. In addition to paying a relatively high booth fee (it varies depending on your vendor category, location, and sometimes your total front footage), you also pay a significant assessment for utilities that is split among all vendors. On top of that, you have your own booth costs (for us, tents, lighting, and fixtures), huge inventory costs, admission for all of your employees (the Fair requires this, and the vendor ticket discount is the same as the early-bird discount at Cub Foods), parking if necessary, and of course wages for all the extra staff you bring aboard.