The Internet Engineering Task Force has chartered a group it hopes will create a standard that lets content creators tell AI developers whether it’s OK to use their work. Named the AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF), the AIPREF charter suggests “attaching preferences to content either by including preferences in content metadata or by signaling preferences using the protocol that delivers content” as the ways to get this done.
Source: IETF building tech to tell AI scrapers what authors want
European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, said four people with knowledge of the plans, a move that is likely to ratchet up tensions with the United States by targeting one of President Trump’s closest advisers.
A report this week by CMU claimed that Suno’s ReMi lyrics model was “spitting out entire sets of lyrics to well-known songs in response to simple prompts”, including works by Eagles, Midnight Oil and Bush. Now songwriters body The Ivors Academy has called for Suno to remove ReMi from its platform due to those claims. “Suno’s new tool is the latest example of unethical AI firms stealing the work, art and livelihoods of lyricists, songwriters and composers,” said CEO Roberto Neri.
Source: Ivors Academy slams Suno over lyrics-regurgitation claims
While privacy, security, and technical challenges limit access to valuable private data, the biggest hurdle is commercial. There is no established system for companies to securely share proprietary data. Without a structured system for data sharing, vast amounts of valuable information will stay locked away, stifling AI-driven advancements and slowing innovation across industries.
OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models. The new paper, out of the AI Disclosures Project, draws the conclusion that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled books from O’Reilly Media.
Source: Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books | TechCrunch
A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta’s alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors’ request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta’s request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of ‘pirate’ library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.
Built for distribution, not attribution, today’s digital infrastructure fails to recognize authorship—let alone enforce it. That failure is now compounding. With AI models scraping everything from novels to music samples, intellectual property has become an open secret: valuable, vulnerable, and increasingly invisible. Story wants to change that. Not by issuing takedown notices or clamping down on remix culture—but by reprogramming IP itself.
Source: Reprogramming IP: Story Builds A Blockchain For The AI Era
IFPI is expected to release the official global recorded music revenue results for 2024 this month, but in the meantime, the clever number crunchers at MIDiA Research have published their own estimates. And the headline stat from MIDiA’s new report: Global recorded music revenues rose 6.5% YoY to $36.2 billion. That marks a slowdown from 2023, when revenues rose 9.7% YoY, per MIDiA’s estimates.
Source: Global recorded music revenues rose 6.5% to $36.2bn in 2024, says MIDiA Research
Music tech company Audoo has partnered with the German performing rights society GEMA for a music impact study utilizing Audoo’s meters. Audoo meters installed in hundreds of venues recognized over 130,000 tracks, contributing to the insights demonstrating that the use of background music increased sales in retail by an average of 8% and in gastronomy by an average of 5.4%.
Bria, a visual gen AI platform built on what it says is “100% licensed data” has closed $40 million in Series B funding, bringing its total capital raised to $65 million. The company says it will also use the funds to widen the application of its patented attribution engine beyond images to music, video, and text generation.
Source: Bria raises $40m to expand patented attribution engine to AI-generated music content