PPL, the UK’s collective management organization (CMO) for performers and recording rightsholders, recorded the highest revenue in its 90-year history in 2024. Revenue for the year rose 6% year-on-year to GBP £301 million (USD $384.4 million at the average exchange rate for 2024) from the previous record of £283.5 million ($352.6 million) set in 2023.
Source: UK collection org PPL’s 2024 revenue jumps 6% to record $384M
A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta’s alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors’ request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta’s request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of ‘pirate’ library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.
The fundamental problem of licenses undermining libraries and scholarly research remains, even as technology and business models shift. Today, some publishers are attempting to implement new contractual bans on artificial intelligence by sending impromptu addendums to their customers and, in some cases, claiming that they’re unable to waive these bans because they intend to create their own AI tool.
Source: AI Is Reigniting Decades-Old Questions Over Digital Rights, but Fair Use Prevails | TechPolicy.Press
Built for distribution, not attribution, today’s digital infrastructure fails to recognize authorship—let alone enforce it. That failure is now compounding. With AI models scraping everything from novels to music samples, intellectual property has become an open secret: valuable, vulnerable, and increasingly invisible. Story wants to change that. Not by issuing takedown notices or clamping down on remix culture—but by reprogramming IP itself.
Source: Reprogramming IP: Story Builds A Blockchain For The AI Era
In a closely watched battle between music publishers and AI developer Anthropic, a California court has denied a request to halt the use of copyrighted song lyrics with its refusal to grant a preliminary injunction. The court ruled that the music publisher failed to demonstrate immediate and irreparable harm, while the scope of the requested restrictions was “ever-expanding.”
Source: Anthropic Scores Preliminary Victory in AI-Copyright Clash Against Music Companies * TorrentFreak
National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) head David Israelite just recently emphasized the stat, “one of the craziest” he’s seen, in a LinkedIn post. By now, many are aware of Spotify’s audiobook-bundling embrace, which is fueling significant royalty effects in the music world. And to put it mildly, the situation isn’t sitting right with songwriters and publishers.
Source: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Made More From Stock Sales Last Year Than All US-Based Songwriters Combined
Cloudflare, a global network service that helps some of the biggest websites in the world deliver content to users, has devised a new plan to deal with AI companies’ web scrapers. And the idea is as positively devious as it is ingenious. Basically, bots that don’t follow the rules laid out for them via protocols such as robots.txt, a simple text file that lays out what web crawlers are allowed to do on a site, will be messed with in order to waste the time and resources of the company in charge of the bot.
Source: One company’s devious plan to stop AI web scrapers from stealing your content
Can internet service providers be held liable for pirating subscribers? Internet provider Grande Communications asked the Supreme Court to review this key question. With no clear standards for handling copyright infringement notices, internet service providers are caught between a rock and a hard place, Grande argues. In its petition, the ISP highlights the need to resolve the “scattershot” approach to ISP liability, seeking a more defined and workable solution.
Source: Supreme Court Asked to Resolve ISP’s Copyright Piracy Conundrum * TorrentFreak
More than 30 performing arts leaders in the UK, including the bosses of the National Theatre, Opera North and the Royal Albert Hall, have joined the chorus of creative industry concern about the government’s plans to let artificial intelligence companies use artists’ work without permission. They also urged the government to support the “moral and economic rights” of the creative community in music, dance, drama and opera.
Source: Performing arts leaders issue copyright warning over UK government’s AI plans
Five-year-old Word Collections just recently announced Songwriter Collections, which it says has direct pacts in place with Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and a variety of different DSPs. Overall, the arrangement enables member songwriters and publishers to receive “100% of their earned royalties from global digital streaming,” per Word Collections.
Source: Word Collections Launches ‘Songwriter Collections’ Service