Publishers and CEOs across the industry agree AI is an existential threat to the future of journalism, and their businesses have spent the past year wrestling with a conundrum: Ink a deal with the AI players or fight it out in court. Do the CEOs and publishers of these trusted news brands prefer paying journalists’ salaries or attorney fees?
Source: Take the Cash or Fight? Media Moguls Split on AI Deals
For decades, the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all.
Source: The rise and fall of robots.txt
Inspired by Universal Music Group‘s ‘artist-centric’ streaming strategy, Spotify’s new rules see ‘premium’ artists and ‘premium’ content financially prioritized over so-called low-quality tracks and creator accounts with low engagement. Amongst those rules are that tracks on Spotify must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate royalties on the platform.
Source: Only 19% of artists on Spotify had over 1,000 monthly listeners in 2023
Apple Music’s moves to increase royalties, by a rate of 10%, for tracks available in Dolby Atmos is being presented by the company as a magnanimous reward; independent labels, however, are reading it as a collective punishment and the opening up of a disquieting two-tier royalties system.
Source: AIM CEO Silvia Montello: Apple Music Atmos royalty change hurts Indies – Music Ally
Senators who have raised bipartisan outcry over the demise of newsrooms at the hands of Big Tech companies are rallying to protect journalism from the potentially fatal blow of artificial intelligence. They’re hoping to ensure that news organizations receive full compensation when algorithms are trained using news articles — and are urging colleagues to act before the twilight of human-generated news sets in.
Source: AI chatbots should pay for news, bipartisan Senate group says – Roll Call
The AI Act is clear on transparency requirements: Developers of “general-purpose” AI models will have to provide a “detailed summary of the content used for training” in order to “facilitate parties with legitimate interests, including copyright holders, to exercise and enforce their rights.” However, the law is less clear on what constitutes a “general-purpose” AI model: are AI models designed to create music, and trained primarily on music, “general purpose”?
Source: EU AI Act headed for parliamentary vote, with some copyright provisions still unclear
Copyright infringement hits home – a cautionary tale. Some of you may have seen the article by David Segal in the Sunday NY Times several weeks ago about a rather sordid copyright fracas in which I have been embroiled over the past few months. It’s a pretty wild story. If you don’t feel like reading the whole NYT article, here’s a brief summary of how it unfolded:
In a lawsuit filed Monday (Feb. 12) in Nashville federal court, The MLC seeks to recover the royalties that Pandora allegedly owes them and all associated late fees. The MLC is particularly concerned with “unusually low royalties per stream” reported and paid out by Pandora, starting in 2021 which they say is due to the exclusion of substantial “Service Provider Revenue and TCC for Pandora Free.”
Source: The MLC Sues Pandora to Recover Unpaid Royalties, Late Fees
Several authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, have suffered an early loss in their copyright battle against OpenAI. The authors accused OpenAI of using pirated copies of their books to train its models. A California federal court dismissed the vicarious copyright infringement and DMCA violation claims. However, the lawsuit isn’t over yet.
Source: Court Dismisses Authors’ Copyright Infringement Claims Against OpenAI * TorrentFreak
While the tools are often complicated and time consuming, several AI companies provide creators with ways to opt their work out of training. Generative AI models depend on training datasets, and the companies behind them are motivated to avoid restricting those potential data pools. So while they often do allow artists to opt their work out, the process can be crude and labor intensive — especially if you have a sizable catalog of work.