AI’s appetite for scraped content, without returning readers, is leaving site owners and content creators fighting for survival. Both search and AI use the results of absolutely ginormous scraping and spidering operations, but one provides benefits to the scrapees, while the other profits enormously from the work of others while simultaneously destroying their motivation to keep doing the work.
Source: How web scraping actually works – and why AI changes everything
US politician Rashida Tlaib is planning to reintroduce her Living Wage for Musicians Act next month, and ahead of that the United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) union is aiming to drum up support for the bill and its key measure: a new streaming royalty paid directly to artists. It is encouraging artists and fans to write to their members of Congress asking them to support the bill when it returns on 29 September.
Source: Living Wage for Musicians Act to be reintroduced in US Congress
Sky News has spent months tracking apparent AI recreations, particularly sports books, that have been sold on Amazon as Kindle e-books, as well as printed versions. “AI created books are an increasing problem for us,” Publishers Association chief executive Dan Conway told Sky News. “It is incredibly easy using these new, amazing tools to create content.
Source: Publishers issue warning on AI-created books imitating sports autobiographies
Shira Perlmutter, who is suing the federal government over the Trump administration’s move to dismiss her from her position as U.S. Register of Copyrights, once again asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to grant an injunction, drawing connections between the timing of her dismissal and the release of the administration’s AI Action Plan.
Source: Defiant Fired Copyright Chief Urges Federal Court to Connect the Dots
A click-to-cancel rule could have a serious downside for streaming services’ revenues – but the global momentum for such a rule is growing. A group of US House representatives have introduced the Click to Cancel Act, a two-page bill that would turn the FTC’s overturned regulation into law, in exactly the same form as the FTC set it out last fall. That would allow the rule to get past the regulatory requirements the FTC faces when it makes changes to how businesses operate.
Source: The US’s ‘click-to-cancel’ rule could soon be law. What would that mean for streaming services?
Cornell’s latest innovation introduces a method to watermark video with imperceptible codes hidden in light sources used during recording. Developed by graduate student Peter Michael and conceptualized by assistant professor Abe Davis, the technique embeds unique, nearly invisible fluctuations in the lighting on-set. These minute variations can’t be seen by the human eye but are recognized by forensic analysis tools once the footage is recorded.
New data from Chartbeat suggests that “search” as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year. This appears to chime with a Google statement earlier this month downplaying the impact of AI Overviews and AI Mode on publisher referrals. However, this includes Google Discover – which has replaced search as the main source of Google traffic. Social media has however sharply declined as a source of publisher traffic in recent years, as has direct traffic.
Source: Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down
The prospect of relying heavily on synthetic data hasn’t gone unnoticed by the creative industries. “I believe the main reason companies like OpenAI are having to rely more on synthetic data now is that they’ve run out of high-quality human created data to mine from the public facing internet,” says Reid Southern, a film concept artist and illustrator, adding, “It further distances them from any copyrighted materials they’ve trained on that could land them in hot water.”
Source: Synthetic data is the new AI gold rush, but critics call it ‘data laundering’
While the music industry continues to grapple with questions around artificial intelligence and fair compensation, SourceAudio has positioned itself as an ethical bridge between AI companies seeking training data and rightsholders demanding fair payment. With 14 million tracks now opted into SourceAudio’s AI dataset licensing program, the firm has struck partnerships with companies includingElevenLabs, Musical AI, and Wondera.
Source: ‘We’re building the market-making infrastructure for the music business’
Publishers including Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023 for copyright infringement, alleging that its Claude chatbot regurgitated copyrighted lyrics, indicating the company had trained the chatbot on those lyrics without permission. Now the music publishers additionally allege that Anthropic hid the fact that it used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted lyrics, lawyers for the publishers said in a document filed on Monday (August 11) with the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Source: Music publishers allege Anthropic used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted lyrics