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Australian Music Industry Demands Action Against Mass-Scale AI Training

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A coalition of Australia’s leading music and creative organizations has united to issue an open letter demanding stronger copyright protections in the face of growing concerns over unauthorized AI training. The coalition includes APRA AMCOS, ARIA, The Copyright Agency, Australian Music Centre, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music Office, Australian Publishers Association, Screenrights, Screen Producers Australia, AIR, and many more.

Source: Australian Music Industry Demands Action Against Mass-Scale AI Training

Gene Wilder’s Voice Resurrected by AI for Netflix’s Willy Wonka Competition Series

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It’s an AI-fueled return to the Chocolate Factory. Netflix has partnered with the AI audio firm ElevenLabs to recreate the voice of actor Gene Wilder, who originated the character’s live-action look in 1971’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and who died in 2016, for its new unscripted reality show “Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.” The AI recreation of Wilder’s voice was done in collaboration with Wilder’s estate, mirroring ElevenLabs’ recreations of contemporaries including Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds.

Source: Gene Wilder’s Voice Resurrected by AI for Netflix’s Willy Wonka Competition Series

A $100 Million Bet on Old Books

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The deal boom that took over music may now be coming for books. Primary Wave Music, a music publisher that acquires and markets the catalogs of artists including Stevie Nicks and Prince, has partnered with writer and entrepreneur Richard Hurowitz for a new venture to buy the rights to major authors’ old books. They are betting they can unearth new revenue by presenting past titles for the #BookTok era.

Source: A $100 Million Bet on Old Books

Google says AI training is fair use and copyright should be policed on outputs, not inputs

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Now, in a new policy paper outlining the company’s preferred approach to AI regulation, Google has argued that training AI models on publicly available web data should “remain protected” by fair use in the US. The paper also says copyright concerns raised by generative AI are best addressed at the level of outputs, not inputs – whether a specific piece of content copies an existing work, rather than how a model was trained.

Source: Google says AI training is fair use and copyright should be policed on outputs, not inputs

The Ghost in the Machine Wants a Cut

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For a hundred years the music business ran on scarcity. A small head of hits drove most of the revenue, and the engine was simple: protect the hits, ignore the rest. Streaming did not break that. It made the head bigger. Drake alone accounts for more of Spotify than the bottom fifty thousand artists combined. Generative music breaks it for real, but not in the way the doomsayers think.

Source: The Ghost in the Machine Wants a Cut

Backstreet Boys file to trademark their voices, joining Taylor Swift and Lionel Richie

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The application, made with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on June 24, covers the group saying: “Hi, we’re the Backstreet Boys.” It takes a page from Taylor Swift’s playbook, after the pop star applied to register her voice saying “Hey, it’s Taylor” in April. If the mark is granted, it would give the group an additional means of contesting AI-generated imitations of their voices online: content that has grown cheaper and easier to produce as the technology improves.

Source: Backstreet Boys file to trademark their voices, joining Taylor Swift and Lionel Richie

Google AI changes could deal further blow to publisher Discover traffic

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Google has started replacing publisher links in its Discover feed with AI-written posts summarising related stories. The new feature, deployed sporadically so far, follows Discover changes which have already downgraded publisher posts in favour of content from X and Youtube. Publishers have seen a sharp drop in referral traffic from the news aggregation feed served to smartphone users.

Source: Google AI changes could deal further blow to publisher Discover traffic

TIDAL cracks down on AI music by cutting off monetization

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Music streaming service TIDAL is the latest to take aim at AI-generated music with the introduction of a new policy that will prevent fully AI-generated music from making money on its platform. In addition, TIDAL will use automated tools to remove AI-generated music that attempts to impersonate an artist or a group, the company said.

Source: TIDAL cracks down on AI music by cutting off monetization

Google accepts need for ‘new value exchange’ with publishers

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Google has said it is exploring new “value exchange models” with publishers and accepted the need for independent regulation of AI. The tech giant’s paper, A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America, has defended the use of publicly available online content for training AI models, but said it is “piloting novel ways to partner with websites whose content meaningfully contributes to the freshness and factuality of generative AI responses”.

Source: Google accepts need for ‘new value exchange’ with publishers

Is Embedding Someone Else’s Image Copyright Infringement? Fifth Circuit May Finally Tell Us

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The Copyright Act grants authors the exclusive right “to display the copyrighted work publicly,” and that right has proven remarkably resistant to resolution in the internet context. Courts across the country have been unable to agree on a deceptively simple question: when a website embeds an image that lives on someone else’s server, and that image appears on a visitor’s screen, who has displayed it?

Source: Is Embedding Someone Else’s Image Copyright Infringement? The Fifth Circuit May Finally Tell Us

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