Rights

Subscription OTT services’ global spend on sports rights in 17 major markets around the world will reach $8.5 billion in 2023 — up 64% versus 2022, projects Ampere Analysis. The research also predicts that the platforms’ share of total global spending on sports rights will leap to 21%, from 13% in 2022. Up to now, subscription OTT services’ spend on sports rights has lagged their investment in original TV and film content.

Source: Digital News Daily: Streamers Projected To Spend $8.5B Globally On Sports Rights In 2023

Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s horror film might ruin your childhood, but it’s a win for creative freedom. Before Winnie-the-Pooh was anything else, he was the intellectual property of the English writer A. A. Milne, who invented the character after seeing a bear from Ontario in a London zoo. But fourteen months ago, Milne’s version of Pooh entered the US public domain. Suddenly, pretty much everything in Milne’s first Pooh collection—the characters, the stories, the line drawings by E. H. Shepard—was up for grabs.

Source: Blood and Honey: In Defence of the Winnie-the-Pooh Slasher Flick | The Walrus

Gary Furlong, a Texas-based audiobook narrator, had worried for a while that synthetic voices created by algorithms could steal work from artists like himself. Early this month, he felt his worst fears had been realized, after learning of a clause in contracts between authors and leading audiobook distributor Findaway Voices, which gave Apple the right to “use audiobooks files for machine learning training and models.”

Source: Audiobook Narrators Fear Apple Used Their Voices to Train AI

Following the initial launch, TikTok confirmed to MBW that Believe-owned digital distribution platform TuneCore had been picked as its distribution partner for SoundOn. But now, TikTok has a new distribution partner: Amsterdam-based B2B tech and services company, FUGA, which was acquired by Downtown Music Holdings in January 2020.

Source: TikTok’s SoundOn distribution service is now powered by FUGA

The European Commission issued on Wednesday (15 February) 11 referrals to the EU’s Court of Justice after six member states failed to transpose copyright measures into national law. Approaching one year from this latest initiative, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Poland, and Portugal have been referred to the EU Court for failing to notify the Commission of their transposition of the Copyright Directive.

Source: EU Commission sends six states to court for not transposing copyright rules

For those interested in the IP implications of the NFT phenomenon, the jury’s verdict in the Hermes case is a clear rejection of the idea that NFT projects are somehow immune from the same IP rules that other businesses and artists have to follow. It is true that a lot of the commercial hype around NFTs has died down a lot after a disastrous 2022. At the same time, there remains plenty of money invested in the NFT space, and the chances for the sector to get hot again can’t be written off.

Source: NFT IP Risks Get Real In MetaBirkins Case

Historically, YouTube has struggled to manage its complicated relationship with the recording industry. The platform’s latest product, however, provides creators with an appealing library of songs and clear licensing terms for those tracks. Creator Music, first announced last year, is now available for all YouTube partners in the United States. The new service is separate from the Shorts Music Library, though the launch of Creator Music has been closely tied to the expansion of YouTube Shorts ads.

Source: Creator Music brings “mainstream” tracks to YouTube videos – Tubefilter

The catalog of Death Row Records, which includes canonical rap albums like 2Pac‘s All Eyez On Me and Snoop Dogg‘s Doggystyle, is now available on TikTok. TikTok is touting the exclusive partnership, which launched on Sunday (Feb. 12) and continues for the rest of the week, as the “first-ever catalog reissue to release exclusively through SoundOn,” the distribution and marketing service the company launched in 2022.

Source: Snoop Dogg Brings Death Row Music Catalog to TikTok

Digital transformation has led to a proliferation in the availability of news sources and content for journalists and publishers, as well as the number of middlemen that publishers have to deal with regularly. As a result, publishers must pay more attention to due diligence — ensuring that they understand the relationships between the original copyright owner and any platforms or middlemen they may use.

Source: Digital distribution & lawsuit threats prompt publishers to plan for copyright compliance

After dipping during the great COVID lockdown, media piracy has come roaring back. The proliferation of popular streaming TV content and the return of robust wide-release film slates have helped drive steady increases in illicit viewing since 2020, according to exclusive data from piracy-focused research firm Muso.

Source: Global Content Piracy Soared 18% in 2022 (Exclusive)