Today a federal judge in San Jose ordered Anthropic to address allegations that one of its expert witnesses referenced a non-existent academic paper in the company’s court filing. The citation is purportedly from the journal American Statistician and was included in the filing to bolster Anthropic’s argument that the reproduction of copyrighted song lyrics is a “rare event.”
Source: Music Publishers Accuse Anthropic AI of ‘Hallucinating’ Citations
German firm AIxchange is the latest startup building bridges between the music industry and GenAI companies through licensing deals for the music data used by the latter to train their models. “Our mission is to empower the GenAI music revolution by offering legal, high-quality music training data, ensuring ethical and compliant licensing for AI music generation,” explains operations manager Peer-Uli May.
Music publishers have refiled their legal complaint against Anthropic, and the AI company has once again moved to have the case dismissed. But this time, the publishers say they come armed with a stronger case, and they argue Anthropic hasn’t. “For its part, Anthropic’s motion to dismiss simply rehashes some of the arguments from its earlier motion – while giving up on others altogether,” a spokesperson for the plaintiff publishing companies said.
The European Commission is open to amending the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act following an upcoming review, a top Commission official told POLITICO’s AI and Tech Summit Tuesday. Kilian Gross, head of the Commission’s AI policy unit, ruled out fundamental reform of the rules and said that simplifying the implementation is the Commission’s first focus. But “if this should not be enough, we will as well reflect whether we need targeted changes.”
Source: EU Commission opens door for ‘targeted changes’ to AI Act
Google considered allowing publishers to opt out of their data being used for AI grounding and still appear in search results but described it as a “hard red line.” New documents disclosed in the remedies portion of an antitrust trial into Google’s search monopoly in the US reveals the tech giant preferred not to give publishers the option as it was “evolving into a space for monetization.”
Source: How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search
Intercept Music says it’s secured $50 million to invest in U.S. and Latin song rights under a ‘private partnership.’ “This is more than just a funding deal—it’s a commitment to restructuring music rights management,” Intercept CEO Tod Turner elaborated. “This partnership is a significant endorsement of our platform and strategy allowing us to combine capital with cutting-edge technology to unlock more value for artists, songwriters, and catalog owners.”
Source: Intercept Music Announces $50 Million Catalog Partnership
While the company says it hasn’t used user-created content for model training, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that it will in the future. A spokesperson for SoundCloud, provided the following statement. “SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud content from our platform for AI training purposes.”
Source: SoundCloud says it isn’t using your music to train generative AI tools
When asked about AI narration, consumers often claim they prefer a human voice yet are increasingly unable to distinguish AI-generated narration from that of a real person. This aversion feels like it speaks to something else, an almost innate mistrust, a sense that something ineffable might be lost, even if we cannot verbalise what that is.
A coalition of entertainment unions, joined by the Motion Picture Association, urged President Trump on Monday to support tax deductions that benefit the entertainment industry. The unions organized a joint letter to Trump, which was also signed by two of Trump’s three “special ambassadors” to the industry, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone.
Source: Unions and MPA Urge Trump to Back Hollywood Tax Deductions
Jonathan Barnett, professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and author of The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property, warned that publishers and other IP businesses need to learn from the lessons of the past—namely, the losses they suffered when Google successfully bet that it could scrape all content available on the internet for free in developing Google Books, a move that a court determined was protected by the fair use doctrine.