Google has processed billions of DMCA takedown requests during the first months of the year. Reporting agency Link-Busters remains the top sender. While its dominance remains, the company appears to have hit a takedown ceiling of roughly 70 million URLs per week. Google won’t confirm whether there’s a limit on the notices it processes and says that trusted parties “can submit the quantity they need.”
Source: Google’s Top DMCA Sender Plateaus at 70 Million Takedowns Per Week
The “Cox effect” continues to ripple across the music industry litigation landscape. In the latest development, Anthropic has shrugged off vicarious liability in the newer copyright infringement suit it’s facing from major music publishers including Concord. Judge Eumi K. Lee just recently signed a related order, thereby approving the publisher plaintiffs’ voluntary dismissal of a vicarious infringement claim without prejudice.
Source: Anthropic Brushes Off Vicarious Infringement Claims In Music Publishers’ Copyright Suit
The complaint, filed on Monday (May 18) in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division, accuses the defendants of continuing to exploit 49 Lead Belly compositions after the estate served formal copyright termination notices. The lawsuit also alleges that an audit of the defendants’ books uncovered more than $289,000 in wrongfully retained royalties. The plaintiff, Terika Dean, is the appointed Trustee of The Huddie Ledbetter Family Trust, according to the complaint.
Source: Estate of Blues pioneer Lead Belly sues group of publishers in copyright dispute
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accused Perplexity of scraping more than 17,000 CNN stories, photos, videos and other content and using that to train its products. The complaint is the network’s first legal case against an AI company seeking to protect its copyrights — and is believed to the first litigation in this area by a TV network,
Source: CNN Sues AI Firm Perplexity, Alleging It Engaged in ‘Massive Copyright Infringement’
When unique creative additions are embedded into immersive experiences, it can sometimes be unclear when an experience ceases to be an exhibition and instead constitutes a new derivative audiovisual work. Some may argue that an immersive production should be characterized as a technologically enhanced form of exhibition because, although the format of the exhibition may have changed, the core substance of the audiovisual work remains the same.
Source: Franchise IP’s New Frontier: Legal Issues in the Rise of Immersive Entertainment
The organizations urge publishers to negotiate usage-based e-book lending models as well as perpetual-use options. “Our organizations, representing the vast majority of public libraries in the U.S. and Canada, call on the Big Five publishers, as well as platform providers, to come to the table to work with libraries to identify and implement sustainable solutions, no matter the format,” the signatories state.
Source: Library Orgs Urge Big Five to Address Digital Pricing
Sony Music Entertainment has asked a federal court for permission to expand its copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music generator Udio, seeking to add over 30,000 copyrighted sound recordings to its complaint. The motion, filed on Friday (May 22) in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, says Sony identified the additional works after gaining access to Udio‘s training data during the discovery process.
Source: Sony Music moves to add more than 30,000 copyrighted recordings to its lawsuit against Udio
A.I. has made it easier to quickly create audiobooks using synthetic narration. Because most antipiracy technology is designed to catch identical files, not altered ones, many of them avoid detection by programs used to identify copyright infringement. A.I. versions of highly anticipated titles often appear on YouTube hours after they are released.
Source: YouTube Is Crawling with Pirated Audiobooks Made Using A.I.
A revised version of the NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act), a bill originally introduced in 2024 and designed to regulate the use of AI to replicate a person’s likeness and voice, was introduced this week hoping to gain momentum. The original version enjoyed bipartisan support from a laundry list of lawmakers, studios, and even tech giants like Amazon, YouTube, and OpenAI.
Source: The ‘No Fakes’ Act is Back; Can a 2026 Version Pass in Congress?
Stability AI has announced the launch of Stable Audio 3.0, a family of four new AI music models that the company promises are trained entirely on licensed data. These new models can generate tracks of more than six minutes in length. Three of the four models are “open-weight,” meaning they are free to download and build upon.
Source: Stability AI Releases ‘Stable Audio 3.0,’ Trained on Authorized Sources