The Writers Guild of America‘s east and west chapters have sent a strongly-worded letter to the heads of the major Hollywood studios, criticizing them for inaction as artificial intelligence appears to be taking copy-written scripts and using it to “plagiarize stolen works.” The WGA officers go on to criticize the studios for doing “nothing to stop this theft. They have allowed tech companies to plunder entire libraries without permission or compensation.”
Rights
✘ Music inside video games – rights & discovery
Music is an inherent part of video games. Moreover, the way music operates inside video games will be a guiding light for the future of music creation. Especially when it comes to procedural music, it’s clear that this has been setting a precedent for understanding music as more fluid intellectual property. The listener becomes an influential element in how the music develops and they shape the sounds to their wants and needs.
Perplexity expands its publisher program
Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw.
Creative bodies press EC on regulation of AI and copyright
A group of organisations representing musicians, authors, visual artists, filmmakers and other creatives have written to the EC’s executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen and commissioner Glenn Micallef to reiterate their key lobbying points on AI. The letter outlines some of the gaps they see in current legislation – for example the ability for rightsholders to reserve their rights when it comes to AI training – and calls for further steps beyond this year’s EU AI Act.
Source: Creative bodies press EC on regulation of AI and copyright
Aptos co-founder: AI training consent a ‘perfect use case’ for blockchain
Giving artificial intelligence models consent to use content for training is a “perfect use case” for blockchain technology, according to Avery Ching, co-founder and chief technology officer of Aptos. He highlighted the potential for blockchain to provide clear consent mechanisms for determining whether specific content can be used for AI training.
Source: AI training consent a ‘perfect use case’ for blockchain — Aptos co-founder
Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant
Amazon is reaching out to news publishers about opportunities to license their content for the next generation of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, slated to debut next year, Axios has learned. The company plans to debut a new, smarter version of Alexa, using generative AI to power customized responses to real-time user queries about the news.
Source: Amazon eyes news partners for revamped AI Alexa voice assistant
Musical AI and Beatoven.ai to launch ‘first fully licensed’ AI music generator
Musical AI and Beatoven.ai’s collaborative project, set to launch in the second half of 2025, aims to “ensure rights holders are compensated for every use of their repertoire.” The platform will be built on Beatoven.ai’s technology, training on a catalog of over3 million songs, loops, samples, and sounds. Musical AI will provide data licensing, attribution of generated outputs, and payments to rightsholders.
Are Spotify’s changes to third-party developer access meant to combat AI scraping?
Spotify has limited third-party developers’ access to its internal data, sparking speculation that the move is meant to prevent user and music data from being used to train AI models. In a Spotify for Developers blog post, the streaming service announced that third-party developers will no longer be able to access certain kinds of data from Spotify.
Source: Are Spotify’s changes to third-party developer access meant to combat AI scraping?
GoldState Music Reportedly Buys $200 Million Worth of Music IP
Nearly three-year-old GoldState just recently confirmed the sizable song-rights purchases (but not the exact value thereof) via its website. Said website also bills Create Music Group as part of GoldState’s growth portfolio; Flexpoint and Goldstuck injected $165 million into Create over the summer, but the corresponding announcement didn’t mention GoldState by name.
Source: GoldState Music Reportedly Buys $200 Million Worth of Music IP
OpenAI sued by Canada’s biggest media outlets
A host of Canadian media companies filed a lawsuit against OpenAI today, alleging “inappropriate and illegal” use of their journalism to power the company’s GPT model, Reuters reports. It’s the latest salvo fired by the media in its fight against AI companies that have scraped large swaths of the open web to train their large-language models.