Facebook parent company Meta is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Sweden-headquartered royalty-free soundtrack provider Epidemic Sound about two months ago over the alleged copyright infringement. Epidemic Sound, which owns a catalog of about 35,000 royalty-free tracks and 90,000 sound effects, sued Meta in July, alleging that the social media giant “knowingly, intentionally and brazenly” stole music created by hundreds of musicians, songwriters, producers and vocalists.
Source: Facebook parent Meta asks court to dismiss Epidemic Sound’s $142m lawsuit
AI text-to-image generators have been making headlines in recent months, but researchers are already moving on to the next frontier: AI text-to-video generators. A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text.
The global music rights acquisitions space’s biggest players have been predominantly based in the US and Europe to date. But over in Asia, new big-money funds have started to make some serious noise over the past few months. Today a new Asia-focused fund just entered the space and it’s launched with an initial raise of USD $100 million.
PRS claims that “for the first time, metadata attributed to over 2 million works will be published, with plans to release millions more, over the following 12 months.” The new online tool will allow songwriters, composers and music publishers to search and download key data about their works. It will also allow them to highlight any discrepancies.
This week saw Napster’s newest owners, Hivemind and Alogrand, double down on their plans to expand the Napster brand into Web3, revealing that former Roblox Global Head of Music Jon Vlassopulos is joining the platform as its new CEO. Vlassopulos guided Roblox’s music strategy between August 2019 and April 2022, and during his tenure there, the platform struck partnerships with labels, publishers, management companies, artists, brands and startups.
Back in the early 1990s, when hip-hop artists were struggling to legitimize sampling, music industry executives tried to fit a square peg in a round hole by applying existing licensing criteria and terminology to a new field that they considered a “fad.” Of course, sampling only grew more popular, and eventually, a new licensing framework was created to accommodate it. Currently, we are having the same problem with Web3.
Artists make thousands and sometimes millions of dollars selling non-fungible tokens, some of which feature celebrities or others. The artist may have protectable rights under the Copyright Act for their original work, but the celebrity portrayed in the NFT has competing publicity rights to control their name, image, and likeness. Whose rights prevail?
This month, NFT platform Probably Nothing announced the launch of “Probably a Label,” a partnership with Warner Records that the firms are billing as the first Web3 record label. After the music business endured decades of bruising legal and policy fights over peer-to-peer file sharing, Probably Nothing co-founder Aaron Ahmadi billed the “weird and radical” partnership as a chance for the industry to try a more liberal approach to IP.