The US Copyright Office (USCO) has launched a public inquiry into music streaming fraud. The inquiry follows a request from Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican US Representative for Wisconsin’s 5th District, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee. His letter to the USCO, dated May 21, opens by asking it to “examine the contributory effects of artificial intelligence (AI) in music streaming fraud, and the resulting effect on the music industry.”
Source: Music streaming fraud inquiry launched by US Copyright Office
The two competing pirate site-blocking bills that were introduced in Congress recently take different approached. While Rep. Darrell Issa’s ACPA targets VPNs and provides broad liability protections to Internet service providers, the bipartisan and bicameral DEFEND IP Act explicitly excludes VPNs, while covering more smaller ISPs. For more than a decade after the SOPA protests, pirate site blocking was a subject U.S. lawmakers preferred to avoid.
The majors and BMG have told the US Supreme Court that it should not let “one Fifth Circuit decision radically disrupt copyright worldwide”, as they push the justices to overturn a ruling won by songwriter Cyril Vetter. That January 12 ruling held that termination under US law returns an author’s rights across the world, and not only in the United States. The publishers say the industry is “actively negotiating deals running through 2072“, and that Vetter concedes foreign rights “represent a significant factor in those negotiations”.
American producer Michael Smith has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for his infamous AI-powered streaming scam that netted him more than $8m in royalties. Smith had created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks, uploaded them to streaming services, then used as many as 10,000 bot accounts to stream those songs fraudulently billions of times. “Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US attorney Jamie McDonald.
Both the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild have issued statements praising an appeals court decision in the Thomson Reuters v. ROSS copyright lawsuit that found ROSS’s copying of Thomson Reuters Westlaw headnotes was not fair use. It was the first time an appeals court ruled that such unauthorized copying by an AI company was not protected by fair use.
On August 2, new transparency and disclosure requirements went into effect for chatbots and AI-generated content under the European Union (EU) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. 
On Wednesday, the Tokyo District Court ruled that voices are a protected publicity right in the first ruling of its kind in the country. However, the court dismissed the request by voice actor Kenjiro Tsuda for TikTok to remove videos narrated using an AI-based voice that he claimed was based on his own. Tsuda is a well-known voice actor in the popular anime “Jujutsu Kaisen.”
A US appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling for information services company Thomson Reuters in its copyright dispute with former legal-research rival Ross Intelligence over Ross’ alleged misuse of copyrighted material to train an AI-powered legal search engine. The 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Ross’ argument that its search engine made fair use of material from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw platform, a first-of-its-kind ruling by a US appeals court in a wave of high-stakes copyright cases over AI training.
The European Commission is gathering feedback on challenges and options for potential future measures to support the impact of technology, including artificial intelligence, on the effective copyright protection amid market and technology developments of creative works and innovations. While the EU already benefits from a robust copyright framework, emerging challenges and market developments raise the question of whether the framework should be reinforced.
The US has criticised Australia’s proposal to give users the ability to opt out of social media algorithms, saying it amounts to “censorship of protected speech”. Under Australia’s draft digital duty of care laws, tech firms risk hefty fines if they fail to give users the option to turn off algorithms in a bid to protect them from harmful content. In a rare submission to the proposed laws, the US embassy in Canberra said it had “serious concerns.”