From the Legal Hotline (1-877-NEWS-LAW)
Q. Do you have any legal concerns about accepting ads for CO2 powered pistols?
A. To the extent such pistols could be considered “firearms,” which I don’t think is the case (see below), I am not aware of any statutes or cases which would prohibit the running of classified advertisements for firearms in a newspaper, although some newspapers have internal polices not to run certain ads for handguns and other items.
Further, as Jim Lake at Thomas LoCicero notes, Florida law defines “firearm” to mean a weapon that “expels a projectile” using an “explosive,” which is “any chemical compound or mixture that…yield[s] readily to combustion or oxidation upon application of heat, flame, or shock.” S. 790.001. CO2 powered pistols do not appear to fall within that definition. Therefore, even if there were restrictions on firearms advertising, they would not apply to them.
Of course, like any ad, the contents must be truthful and not misleading. But I don’t see any restrictions aimed at CO2 pistols specifically.
Q. Our county is planning to cut their legal descriptions from this year’s delinquent property tax ads. It looks as if each individual parcel will be about 1-3 lines less than last year. Have you run into this? Can the county do this?
A. The applicable language in the DOR regulation below says a legal description or parcel id (or other identifying info.) can be used. See also below a note from another publisher I reached out to that may be helpful to you.
12D-13.036 Advertisement of Property with Delinquent Taxes.
(1) The advertisement must include:
(f)1.The legal description as shown on the tax roll, or the parcel identification number or other information which identifies the property on the current tax roll.
2. If the parcel identification number is used, this language must be included in the newspaper notice of sale: See Current Tax Roll for Complete Legal Description.
(2) (a) The tax collector may list all lots to be sold that are owned by the same taxpayer in a subdivision under one subdivision heading. For example: Wild Subdivision, Lot 1, Block A, Lot 6, Block R. (b) To apportion the advertising costs among the parcels of property, the costs of the subdivision heading will be prorated to all parcels advertised in that particular subdivision. The cost of advertising legal descriptions may be computed on a flat rate basis, regardless of the length of the description.
A publisher we reached out to said—”We used to charge per line for delinquent taxes, but about 10 years ago went to charging by the parcel. I had to have staff literally count every single line in the delinquent tax section; after the change it was just multiply by the number of parcels. So, the way to deal with it is to bid with a price for each parcel, not on a per line basis – if that’s helpful.”
Q. Are there any legal concerns we should be aware of regarding using AI-generated ad design? We have several designers that use ChatGPT. Mostly they have used AI for ideas and rebuilding the ads in InDesign… but some of the ads are good enough we could just use them as PDF’s.
A. Generative AI is a new technology, and the courts are just starting to deal with all the legal issue associated with its use.
In the meantime, I would be cautious about using AI-generated images because you often don’t know what source material AI uses to “mature” the image. For example, does copyright, patent, trademark infringement apply to AI creations? Is it clear who owns the content that generative AI platforms create for you, or your customers?
If the underlying work AI uses is in fact copyrighted, the question will be whether the AI image is sufficiently different from its source material to become unequivocally “transformative.”
If it’s insufficiently transformative, it would be an unauthorized, derivative work.
So, for example, what if you have an image of a medical employee model dressed in scrubs and the image is owned by Getty Images (an image licensing service)–do the AI tools that change the photo to depict a man in a suit different enough from its source material to become unequivocally ”transformative” such that copyright does not protect it? Or, is it insufficiently transformative such that it is an unauthorized derivative work? If Getty has rights in the medical employee photo, will it still scrape for the image in a suit, and send a copyright infringement letter demanding damages? It’s difficult to answer these questions without more guidance.
Until the law is clearer, my rule of thumb would be to treat AI-generated photos carefully–like how you treat photos in general and steer clear of photos you are not authorized to use or where there is uncertainty about ownership.
Also, keep in mind that a key concern in these matters is who owns the copyright in the original (unaltered) work, and when they licensed the work, did they grant the right to alter or revise it? In other words, even if an alteration might not violate the copyright laws, it might breach the license agreement with the author of the photo.
For example, again using the above example, what rights were granted by the model posing in the photo? Did they agree that their image could be used even if their attire/appearance was changed? If not, using the image could violate their rights of publicity.
For the time being, and until those questions are answered, I would advise caution.