By the numbers, said payment consists of the maximum $150,000 a pop in statutory damages for 48 Warner Music recordings as well as 50 recordings apiece for Sony Music and Universal Music – or $22.2 million total. And the label litigants further spelled out that “if needed,” they could identify a multitude of their works in the 86 million tracks that Anna’s Archive allegedly scraped from Spotify.
Source: Major Labels Seek ‘Extremely Conservative’ $322 Million in Damages from Anna’s Archive
Capitol CMG, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing, BMG Rights Management and Essential Music Publishing filed a motion on March 26 in the US Middle District of Louisiana asking the court to substitute them as defendants in place of Robert Resnik, who sold his asserted 25% stake in Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love) to the publishers on March 20. The publishers said in the filing that they acquired Resnik’s stake as they seek to ask the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s January ruling.
Source: Publishers acquire stake in song at center of termination rights case; plan SCOTUS challenge
As this recent report highlights, more than 1,000,000 UK businesses use machine learning but, contrary to the hype, most will not be using GenAI models and virtually none creating music.In the modern world, where everything we do with online material involves a copy being made of it by a computer and its network, how we define the scope of copyright law has major consequences for our ability to harness the full potential of digital technologies.
Source: Copyright maximalism will stifle a research-intensive digital economy
If a Cox subscriber used broadband to pirate a novel, Cox did not build its network to enable that outcome. When a user prompts an AI model to write in the style of Cormac McCarthy or generate a sonnet that reads like Shakespeare, the system was built explicitly to fulfill that request. Under Judge Thomas’s framework, that distinction could matter enormously.
Source: SCOTUS’s Cox Ruling Could Impact Publishers’ Fight Against AI
The decision establishes a clear rule that contributory copyright liability requires inducement of infringement or provision of a service tailored to infringement. Mere knowledge that a service is being used for infringement, even coupled with a failure to terminate the infringing user, is insufficient. This provides significant protection for ISPs and other general-purpose service providers.
Source: SCOTUS Copyright Decision a Big Win for ISPs and, Potentially, Other Digital Players
Filed on Monday in San Jose federal court, the publishers push back against tech companies’ continued claim that “fair use” applies to copying millions of copyrighted works without authorization to train AI models. Their case argues that Claude’s AI-generated lyrics are by definition derivatives of the publishers’ lyrics and “compete with and dilute the market” for them. “The evidence in this case is overwhelming,” the filing asserts, adding that Anthropic has “committed copyright infringement on a massive scale.”
Source: Major Publishers Make a Decisive Legal Strike Against Anthropic’s ‘Limitless AI Rip-Offs’
The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with internet provider Cox Communications, holding that it cannot be held liable for music piracy even if it did not take adequate steps to curb the copyright infringement. The justices, in a 9-0 ruling, were weighing in on a lengthy legal fight between Cox and Sony Music Entertainment, which had sought huge damages against the internet provider for not blocking service to those who egregiously downloaded protected works.
Source: Supreme Court Limits Liability of ISPs for Music Piracy
A judge has dismissed an antitrust case brought by two US news publishers alleging Google has monopolized the online news market via its search business. US District Judge Amit P. Mehta said the publishers did not successfully prove they have antitrust standing, meaning that they had suffered harm as a result of the tech giant’s actions within the search market.
Source: US judge dismisses Google monopoly claim brought by local publishers
On Thursday, Michael Smith, the man accused of defrauding music streaming services with AI-generated slop tracks, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Smith agreed to pay back the $8,091,843.64 he received in royalties from the streamers, and his charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. “Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” said Jay Clayton, a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Source: First-Ever US Streaming Music Fraud Case Ends In a Guilty Plea
The publisher said that Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta Platforms , OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI and Elon Musk’s xAI used pirated copies of its books to teach their chatbots to respond to human prompts. The publisher’s complaint is unique in targeting several tech juggernauts at once. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys at law firm Freedman Normand Friedland, who have brought a similar ongoing case against Big Tech companies on behalf of writer John Carreyrou and other authors.
Source: Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher sues tech companies over AI training