Headlines

ELVIS Act signed into law in Tennessee to protect artists’ voice and likeness from AI

The bipartisan ELVIS Act was signed into law on Thursday (March 21) by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee at a honky-tonk in Nashville. The ELVIS Act will officially go into effect on July 1 and will update the state’s existing right of publicity. The bill was introduced in January to update Tennessee’s Protection of Personal Rights law, to include protections for songwriters, performers, and music industry professionals’ voices from the misuse of artificial intelligence (AI).

Source: ELVIS Act signed into law in Tennessee to protect artists’ voice and likeness from the misuse of AI

Spotify Claims Record Earnings in 2023 for Indie Artists, Songwriters

Spotify has provided further details on the record $9 billion it paid out to the music industry in 2023, which was first announced in January. For context, the company stated that the “amount has nearly tripled over the past six years, and represents a big part of the $48 billion-plus Spotify has paid since its founding.” In Tuesday’s announcement the company says the number of artists generating at least $1,000,000, $100,000 and $10,000 all have nearly tripled since 2017 — and those earnings are from Spotify alone.

Source: Spotify Claims Record Earnings in 2023 for Indie Artists, Songwriters and Non-English-Language Songs

Kobalt Funding Tops $1B Following Refinancing, Royalty Securities

Less than five months after unveiling an over $700 million catalog partnership with Morgan Stanley, Kobalt says it’s increased its total “funding capacity” to north of $1 billion. New York-based Kobalt touted the deployable capital today, via a formal release. The more than $1 billion at hand refers specifically to the mentioned Morgan Stanley-powered tranche as well as a refinancing and a newly obtained $266.5 million from an asset-backed securitization.

Source: Kobalt Funding Tops $1B Following Refinancing, Royalty Securities

Music licensing platform WavMaker launches with $5m seed funding

WavMaker, a new music licensing platform dedicated to video creators, has launched with $5 million in seed funding led by Vicky Patel, a principal at Nashville record label Wavy Records and co-founder of Monarch Media. The startup says it seeks to help video creators streamline the process of finding high-quality music for video projects by offering a curated library of songs cleared for commercial use.

Source: Music licensing platform WavMaker launches with $5m seed funding

House TikTok bill gives ByteDance 6 months to sell. That’s unlikely.

A forced sale of TikTok within 180 days, as House-passed legislation requires, would be one of the thorniest and most complicated transactions in corporate history, posing financial, technical and geopolitical challenges that experts said could render a sale impractical and increase the likelihood the app will be banned nationwide. A sale would require severing a company worth potentially $150 billion from its technical backbone while being the subject of legal challenges and resistance from China.

Source: House TikTok bill gives ByteDance 6 months to sell. That’s unlikely.

France Fines Google Amid A.I. Dispute With News Media

French regulators on Wednesday said Google failed to notify news publishers that it was using their articles to train its artificial intelligence algorithms, part of a wider ruling against the company for its negotiating practices with media outlets. The disclosure by the French competition authority was part of a fine of €250 million, or about $270 million, for failing to negotiate fair licensing deals with media companies to publish article links in search results.

Source: France Fines Google Amid A.I. Dispute With News Media

Why AI watermarks miss the mark in preventing misinformation

Watermarking has been floated by Big Tech as one of the most promising methods to combat the escalating AI misinformation problem online. But so far, the results don’t seem promising, according to experts and a review of misinformation conducted by NBC News. The technologies are only in their infancy and in a limited state of deployment but, already, watermarking has proven to be easy to bypass.

Source: Why AI watermarks miss the mark in preventing misinformation

DeepFake detectors have become indispensable

For around three years, a field of research has been developing around the detection of DeepFakes. There are two main approaches. The first involves spotting suspicious behaviour by a person in a video. An AI can be fed a large number of authentic videos of a celebrity, so that it learns to immediately detect any anomalies in their gestures or speech. The second, more general technique involves identifying the differences between DeepFakes and real videos.

Source: Artificial intelligence: DeepFake detectors have become indispensable

New York Times: Microsoft’s AI Tools Are Nothing Like The VCR 

The New York Times has responded to Microsoft’s motion to dismiss key claims in the highly publicized ‘GPT’ copyright infringement lawsuit. After Microsoft compared the lawsuit to the VCR scaremongering of the early 1980s, The Times stresses that generative AI is nothing like the VCR, before doubling down on its copyright infringement allegations.

Source: New York Times: Microsoft’s AI Tools Are Nothing Like The VCR * TorrentFreak

Jammable Faces BPI Legal Threat Over Soundalike Artist Voices

London’s BPI today confirmed the development on social media, pointing readers to a (paywall-blocked) breakdown of the situation from The Times. Jammable (formerly Voicify AI) bills itself as “the #1 platform for AI music.” And according to its website, the service enables users to replicate uploaded voices, automatically remove reverb from recordings, generate text-to-speech vocals, and make existing projects’ vocals sound as if they’d been recorded in different voices, among other things.

Source: Jammable Faces BPI Legal Threat Over Soundalike Artist Voices

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