In an open letter, BBC director-general Tim Davie, Financial Times CEO Jon Slade, The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson, Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, and Telegraph Media Group CEO Anna Jones have invited “global leaders across publishing, broadcasting, media and news” — to join as founding members of SPUR (the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition).
Source: U.K. News Organizations Form Media Coalition Over AI Publishing Rights
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Thomson said News Corp has a “woo and a sue strategy.” He explained: “We’ll woo you, we’d like you to be our partner, but if you’re stealing our stuff we are going to sue you. And if you look at a lot of the bots coming in and scraping our stuff and they’re using our material in new AI verticals, we’re coming for you.
Source: News Corp CEO Robert Thomson warns AI companies scraping without paying: ‘We’re coming for you’
Robert Kyncl has published a letter to Warner Music Group shareholders that pushes back against any under-appreciation of WMG’s value in the financial market, while talking up AI’s potential to drive that value higher. Both WMG and Universal Music Group shares are currently trading significantly below their 52-week peaks. Last Tuesday (February 24), a telling analyst note from Rothschild & Co Redburn argued that music rightsholders are particularly “exposed” to threats from AI-generated content.
Source: Robert Kyncl tells WMG shareholders: AI is music’s next growth engine, not its downfall
Perplexity wrote to a New York judge last week arguing the News Corp subsidiaries should be forced to hand over records showing the hundreds of queries they made to “fish” for a basis to sue within its AI search tool before launching the claim in October 2024. Perplexity told Judge Katherine Failla: “This discovery would reveal an inconvenient truth: Plaintiffs repeatedly and deceptively crossed the line from investigation to entrapment.”
Source: Perplexity claims News Corp tried to ‘entrap’ chatbot to make copyright case
Activist investment fund Irenic Capital Management reportedly made an unsolicited takeover bid for Reservoir Media, the Nasdaq-listed independent music company. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, which said the bid, submitted in February, values Reservoir at between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion, including debt, at a per-share price of $10 to $11.
Source: Reservoir receives unsolicited $1.2B bid from activist investor Irenic Capital
The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system. Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.
Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material
More than a dozen online tools claim they can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s A.I. by looking for hidden watermarks, composition errors and other digital clues. The reality is more mixed, according to a battery of tests conducted by The New York Times. While many tools did a good job detecting some A.I. content, they were not accurate enough to offer users complete confidence.
Source: These Tools Say They Can Spot A.I. Fakes. Do They Really Work?
The world’s top AI models can be prompted to generate near-verbatim copies of bestselling novels, raising fresh questions about the industry’s claim that its systems do not store copyrighted works. A series of recent studies has shown that large language models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and xAI memorize far more of their training data than previously thought.
Source: AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data
When a dispute arose over orchestral music appearing in the new Melania Trump documentary, “Melania,” aficionados of music, film and politics all stood to pay attention. The subject of licensing music rights is fascinating and thorny enough in its own right. Add to that a member of Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, and one of today’s top film directors, Paul Thomas Anderson, seeming to have a beef with the nation’s First Couple, and naturally it made headlines.
In an open letter titled ‘Say No to Suno’, the artist reps described the company as a “brazen smash and grab” platform, accusing it of using “unauthorized AI platform machinery trained on human artists’ work”. Published Monday (February 23) on the Music Technology Policy blog, the letter was signed by figures including Ron Gubitz, Executive Director of the Music Artist Coalition; and Helienne Lindvall, songwriter and President of the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance.