In its latest Global Collections Report, CISAC, which represents 228 CMOs in 111 countries, reported total royalty collections of €13.97 billion (USD $15.12 billion) across music, audiovisual, visual arts, literature and drama in 2024. That’s a 6.6% increase over 2023. Royalties to songwriters and publishers accounted for fully 90% of that total, growing 7.2% YoY to €12.59 billion ($13.63 billion).
Source: Global songwriter royalty collections reached $13.6bn in 2024, up 7.2%, CISAC reports
People Inc., one of the largest media publishers in the U.S., has signed an AI licensing deal with Microsoft. The media giant (formerly known as Dotdash Meredith) made the announcement Tuesday as a part of parent company IAC’s third-quarter earnings. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel described the new marketplace as “essentially a pay-per-use market where AI players directly can compensate publishers for use of their content on, sort of like an ‘a la carte’ basis.”
Source: People Inc. forges AI licensing deal with Microsoft as Google traffic drops | TechCrunch
The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence across creative industries has sparked a cascade of legislative and judicial activity worldwide, reshaping how intellectual property is defined, created, and protected. For media and entertainment companies, content creators, and IP rightsholders, these evolving—and often conflicting—international approaches to AI and copyright present new challenges and can raise more questions than answers.
When ChatGPT’s native image generator was released in March, it became a popular trend for users to prompt for re-creations of their selfies or pet pictures in the style of the studio’s films. Now, as more people get access to OpenAI’s Sora app and video generator, Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has requested that OpenAI refrain from using its members’ content for machine learning without permission.
Source: Studio Ghibli and other Japanese publishers want OpenAI to stop training on their work | TechCrunch
Getty withdrew a key part of its case against Stability AI during the trial as it admitted there was no evidence the training and development of AI text-to-image product Stable Diffusion took place in the UK. In addition a claim of secondary infringement of copyright was dismissed because, the judge said, “an AI model such as Stable Diffusion which does not store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so) is not an ‘infringing copy’” under UK law.
Source: Getty vs Stability AI ruling is ‘damp squib’ that fails to create precedent
The Music Artists Coalition responds to Universal Music Group’s partnership with AI platform Udio, demanding clarity and compensation. “Every technological advance offers opportunity, but we have to make sure it doesn’t come at the expense of the people who actually create the music—artists and songwriters,” said Irving Azoff, board member and founder of MAC. “We’ve seen this before—everyone talks about ‘partnership,’ but artists end up on the sidelines with scraps.”
Source: Irving Azoff, MAC Demand ‘Creative Control, Fair Compensation’
AI browsers present new problems for media outlets, because agentic systems are making it even more difficult for publishers to know and control how their articles are being used. For instance, when we asked Atlas and Comet to retrieve the full text of a nine-thousand-word subscriber-exclusive article in the MIT Technology Review, the browsers were able to do it.
AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Source: Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images | TechCrunch
YouTube channels from major news publishers and creators were in video data sets used by Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Runway, and Bytedance. For example, 11,604 videos from the official YouTube channel of The New York Times across 11 different data sets are in the database. Over 8,000 of these videos, though, came from a single training data source — Runway Gen-3.
Universal Music has unveiled a partnership deal with Stability AI, which is set to develop a suite of music creation tools with the major. Ultimately, said tools will advance “responsible innovation that supports both artists and rightsholders while preserving the integrity of the art form,” according to the companies. While those companies opted against shedding light on the products’ specifics, they did emphasize an objective of putting out “fully licensed, commercially safe AI music tools.”
Source: Universal Music Group Announces Stability AI ‘Strategic Alliance’