Tony Blair’s thinktank has urged the UK to relax copyright laws in order to let artificial intelligence firms build new products, as it warned a tougher approach could strain the transatlantic relationship. “Without similar provisions in the United States, it would be hard for the UK government to enforce strict copyright laws without straining the transatlantic relationship it has so far sought to nurture.”
Source: UK needs to relax AI laws or risk transatlantic ties, thinktank warns
A group of European authors, performers and other rightsholders have issued a joint statement slamming the third draft of the European Union’s GPAI (General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence) Code of Practice. A coalition of creatives said the third draft is “completely unacceptable” as it “undermines the objectives of the AI Act, contravenes EU law and ignores the intention of the EU legislator,” according to their statement published on Friday (March 28).
Berlin-based BMG reported $497 million/€459 million (up 11.1% YoY) in revenue for 2024’s opening half. Like with the majors’ financials, acquisitions are factoring into the numbers. Among different things, BMG dropped approximately $540 million/€500 million on some 24 catalogs as well as signings during 2024, with 10 of the catalog deals having wrapped in H1, higher-ups disclosed.
Source: BMG Reports Over $1B in 2024 Revenue Amid Distribution Pivot
Pophouse Entertainment, the Sweden-based music investment firm co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, has raised over EUR €1.2 billion (USD $1.3 billion) for its debut fund. The Stockholm-based company announced Monday (March 31) that Pophouse Fund I raised over €1 billion ($1.1 billion), reaching its hard cap and making it, “one of the largest first-time private equity funds to be raised in Europe in the last decade”.
Source: Pophouse Entertainment, the firm behind ABBA Voyage, closes $1.3bn music rights buying fund
The penultimate draft of the European Union’s AI Code of Practice has a blind spot: it only limits copyright compliance requirements to web crawling. This narrow focus ignores other data collection methods—such as torrenting—potentially creating loopholes in AI training data regulations.
Source: Is Web Scraping the Only Copyright Concern for AI? – Open Future
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI’s request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or payment. In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case’s main copyright infringement claims to go forward.
Source: Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward
As reported earlier today (March 26), a federal judge in California shot down a request from UMG and the other music publishers (including Concord and ABCKO) to block the AI company from using song lyrics to train its AI models. Importantly, the court did, however, issue two separate but related discovery orders on March 25 – granting Universal and the other publisher plaintiffs significant investigative tools to potentially improve their legal arguments.
The industry bodies demand that AI developers obtain proper licenses before using copyrighted works to train their models. They point to precedents like OpenAI’s licensing agreements with media companies such as ShutterStock and the Financial Times as a positive model. The recommendation emphasizes that licensing of AI training creates a “symbiotic relationship” between rights owners and AI developers.
Source: What the RIAA, NMPA and other music organizations want from Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan
PPL, the UK’s collective management organization (CMO) for performers and recording rightsholders, recorded the highest revenue in its 90-year history in 2024. Revenue for the year rose 6% year-on-year to GBP £301 million (USD $384.4 million at the average exchange rate for 2024) from the previous record of £283.5 million ($352.6 million) set in 2023.
Source: UK collection org PPL’s 2024 revenue jumps 6% to record $384M
A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta’s alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors’ request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta’s request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of ‘pirate’ library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.