The entertainment giant struck an alliance with TikTok that will have creators on the popular quick-hit video service making shorts tied to characters and stories from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, FX and more. The resulting pieces from creators who opt-in to the program will be available on both TikTok and on Disney+ in the form of “Verts,” the company’s vertical video products.
Source: Disney, TikTok Strike Content-Sharing Deal Aimed at Boosting Short-Form Programming on Disney+
South Korea‘s largest music copyright collective has ended its ban on registering songs made with artificial intelligence. The Korean Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) will now register AI-assisted works and pay royalties on them, provided a human creator took a substantial part in the writing, composition, or arrangement. The amended rules took effect on Monday (August 3), replacing a ban that had applied since March 24, 2025.
At industry events publishers fume about the broken bargain with Google, which historically scraped and copied their entire websites at no charge in exchange for sending them substantial amounts of traffic. Now that referral traffic is drying up. At events most agree that publishers must unite to strike a new collective bargain with Google based on a universally applied fair payment for content model. But privately many are signing secret deals with Google that provide them with cash and (a little) referral traffic in the short-term.
Source: The prisoner’s dilemma: Why UK publishers are signing Google AI deals
Spotify has signed a licensing agreement with Merlin, the digital licensing partner for independent labels and distributors, for its upcoming fan-made covers and remixing tool. The tool will let fans create covers and remixes of songs from participating Merlin members’ artists and songwriters. It will launch as a paid add-on for Spotify Premium users, and according to the company, “will create an additional revenue stream for participating artists”.
Source: Merlin signs Spotify licensing deal for AI-powered ‘fan-made’ covers and remixes
After the Supreme Court’s Cox ruling reshaped ISPs piracy liability, the record labels behind a $46.8 million verdict against Grande Communications are ready to walk away from the case entirely. Grande won’t let them, however. The Internet provider is holding out for a formal win and the millions in bond costs it says the appeal ran up.
Source: Record Labels Offer to Abandon $46.8 Million Piracy Case Against Grande
On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.
Source: Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive
Germany’s GEMA has notched another AI legal victory – this time over Suno, which the Munich Regional Court has reportedly ordered to disclose its revenue and pay damages. Meanwhile, the music-generation startup is set to appeal. GEMA touted its “groundbreaking success” today, after suing Suno closer to 2025’s start. Additionally, although legal documents themselves aren’t usually made available to the public in Germany, the Munich Regional Court provided a detailed breakdown of its decision.
Source: GEMA Notches a Major Legal Win Over Suno in High-Stakes Infringement Case
Charles Graeber said he has some positive feelings about being among the three main plaintiffs in one of the largest copyright infringement settlements in history. “I was proud to be part of a group that showed that a ragtag bunch of authors joined later by publishers could actually hold together as a class, face a Goliath and get a meaningful number out of them,” The New York Times bestselling author and journalist told NPR. But he’s also hesitant to call the efforts and outcome of the lawsuit an all-out win.
Source: Authors have mixed feelings about the $1.5B Anthropic copyright infringement ruling
What does it feel like when an AI version of you takes your job? That was the strange reality facing actor Ashley BeLoat when she came across an AI-generated remake of a series she had starred in.
Source: Actors are losing roles to AI knockoffs of themselves
AI is sampling. There, I said it. And as someone who’s been handling sample clearances for over three decades, I should know. The key thing to understand here is that AI can never generate something new; it can only recontextualize existing data that is fed into it. When it comes to music, that data is the 1s and 0s of digital music files. So when you ask an AI platform to generate a song, the result is inherently tied to the music that was used to train the model.
Source: Why AI is sampling – and how that will affect the future (opinion)