On October 19, 2026, the Court released an order that could eventually shake the foundations of the music publishing business. There was no dramatic courtroom showdown, no impassioned closing argument, and no sweeping declaration about the rights of American songwriters. In fact, the justices didn’t decide the central copyright question at all. Instead, an unusual procedural action left standing a federal appeals court decision that could cost some of the world’s largest music companies a significant amount of money.
Source: The Supreme Court Just Threw a Wrench Into The Music Industry’s Cash Machine
Nearly 300 authors filed copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms on October 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books and, more recently, on physical books it bought and scanned without a license. Rather than join a class action suit, in which a few named plaintiffs sue on behalf of everyone, each author is pursuing an individual claim.
The model we’ve quietly relied on for 20 years, outsourcing product development to whoever can afford to be sued, is no longer fit for purpose. So, the license can’t sit with the creator. It has to sit at the engine layer, carried by the platform as infrastructure, the way blanket rights sit under radio. Which means the deals we should be doing right now are with the engine makers, before the defaults harden.
Spotify‘s quest to curb the chaos AI-generated music has brought onto the platform has prompted it to remove 50 million AI slop tracks from users’ recommendations this year, a new figure shared Tuesday as part of the company’s public insights into how it’s navigating the AI era. The 50 million tracks the streamer removed from recommendations were in addition to more than 75 million tracks Spotify pulled completely after being flagged as spam.
The Writers Guild of America East has struck a partnership with the AI shielding tool Cloak, a service that aims to help writers safeguard their work from training AI models. The effort responds to years of training from those models on screenplays without explicit permission, which has sparked questions over the legality of using those scripts without permission. The union has maintained that using scripts to train AI models does not constitute fair use.
The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has accused AI companies of trying to “strong-arm” Australia’s government into loosening the country’s copyright rules on AI training. ICMP warned that, of the dozens of countries AI firms have lobbied for weaker copyright protections, Australia appears to be the only one considering the idea. ICMP Director General John Phelan said AI companies were asking policymakers to “legitimize larceny.”
News publishers have until 30 October to decide whether to leave Meta social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram or hand over over AI content access to the tech giant under new terms and conditions. The social media giant has given notice of updated terms and conditions which give it sweeping rights to scrape content from any publisher that uses Instagram and Facebook and reuse it.
The labels made their case in a filing in Boston federal court last Tuesday (October 13), opposing Lightspeed’s motion to quash their subpoena. Among the topics they want a Lightspeed representative to answer questions on: the “legal risk of training data,” as discussed in a document Lightspeed has already produced in the case. The same Lightspeed document discusses a “two sided music platform,” according to the subpoena.
Generative artificial intelligence differs fundamentally from conventional photographic manipulation. Photoshop alters an existing image. A generative model can create an image of an event that never occurred, involving people who were never present in a location that may itself never have existed. 
One marathon legal battle later, the Supreme Court has decided against reviewing the landmark precedent at the center of BMG v. Vetter, and organizations including the Songwriters Guild of America are touting the development as a major victory for songwriters. As many know, the important decision materialized in a years-running showdown involving Resnik Music Group and Vetter, who’d moved to terminate the grant of his copyright in “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” under Section 304 of the Copyright Act.