On October 19, 2026, the Court released an order that could eventually shake the foundations of the music publishing business. There was no dramatic courtroom showdown, no impassioned closing argument, and no sweeping declaration about the rights of American songwriters. In fact, the justices didn’t decide the central copyright question at all. Instead, an unusual procedural action left standing a federal appeals court decision that could cost some of the world’s largest music companies a significant amount of money.
Source: The Supreme Court Just Threw a Wrench Into The Music Industry’s Cash Machine
Nearly 300 authors filed copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms on October 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books and, more recently, on physical books it bought and scanned without a license. Rather than join a class action suit, in which a few named plaintiffs sue on behalf of everyone, each author is pursuing an individual claim.
The model we’ve quietly relied on for 20 years, outsourcing product development to whoever can afford to be sued, is no longer fit for purpose. So, the license can’t sit with the creator. It has to sit at the engine layer, carried by the platform as infrastructure, the way blanket rights sit under radio. Which means the deals we should be doing right now are with the engine makers, before the defaults harden.
The Writers Guild of America East has struck a partnership with the AI shielding tool Cloak, a service that aims to help writers safeguard their work from training AI models. The effort responds to years of training from those models on screenplays without explicit permission, which has sparked questions over the legality of using those scripts without permission. The union has maintained that using scripts to train AI models does not constitute fair use.
The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has accused AI companies of trying to “strong-arm” Australia’s government into loosening the country’s copyright rules on AI training. ICMP warned that, of the dozens of countries AI firms have lobbied for weaker copyright protections, Australia appears to be the only one considering the idea. ICMP Director General John Phelan said AI companies were asking policymakers to “legitimize larceny.”
Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others.
Spotify’s voluminous submission is decidedly light on mentions of inflation – meaning the DSPs don’t appear to be on board with the annual inflation adjustments sought by Word Collections, the Songwriters Guild of America, and others. But they are adamant that Phono IV’s bundling provision, which, in brief, enables them to unilaterally reclassify multi-product subscriptions as bundles and reap massive mechanicals savings, has been an unmitigated success.
It’s a sobering reality. But decades since the dawn of digital, the music industry never quite wrapped its arms around problems like metadata mismatches and lagging artist payouts. Billions have been thrown at the problem, laws have been passed, lawsuits have been litigated, and startups have crashed trying to resolve issues with metadata matching, ownership splits, and royalty payments. Sadly, the complexity and enormity of the issue are only growing, especially with AI slop entering the picture.
Taylor Swift‘s company, TAS Rights Management, has filed applications to trademark her voice in the UK, the European Union, and Australia. The new filings, spotted by MBW, follow three applications that the company submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in April. Those US applications covered recordings of Swift saying “Hey, it’s Taylor” and “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift,” along with a photograph of her holding a pink guitar on stage.
Lawsuits can stop particular conduct, impose consequences, and establish important precedents. They can also end in private agreements that leave the central questions unanswered for everyone else. A settlement tells us that the parties have found terms they can accept. It does not tell us that musicians have acquired a future they can live with. Copyright needs to be completely reconceptualized and recreated in the United States and across the world.