The action states that, beginning in March 2024, Spotify asserted that its Premium Individual, Duo, and Family subscription streaming plans were now bundled subscription offerings because those plans now include access to audiobooks. Applying the rate formula applicable to bundled subscription offerings results in a reduction to the service provider revenue that Spotify reports.
Source: Mechanical Licensing Collective Files Lawsuit Against Spotify
Sony Music Group is sending out warnings to what sources say are around 700 AI developers and music streaming services, warning them not to use its content to train AI. These so-called “opt-out” letters, which have been obtained by Variety, state that developers will need explicit permission to use that content and warns that some may already be in violation.
Source: Sony Music Warns AI Developers Not to Use Its Content for Training
Earlier this year, Spotify released its annual Loud & Clear report which rounded up global royalties data. Now, Spotify has unveiled UK-specific equivalent data. The UK figures include the overarching (royalties generated by UK artists from Spotify exceeded £750M in 2023) and drill down to artist-level (the number of UK artists who generated over £10,000 and £50,000 in royalties from Spotify in 2023 has doubled since 2017).
Source: Spotify reveals UK-specific streaming royalties data
Newly unsealed documents in the class-action lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild against OpenAI show the startup deleted two huge datasets, named “books1” and “books2,” that had been used to train its GPT-3 artificial-intelligence model. Lawyers for the Authors Guild said in court filings that the datasets probably contained “more than 100,000 published books.”
A recently published research paper co-authored by Boaz Barak, a scientist on OpenAI’s Superalignment team, proposes a framework to compensate copyright owners “proportionally to their contributions to the creation of AI-generated content.” How? Through cooperative game theory.
Source: This Week in AI: Generative AI and the problem of compensating creators | TechCrunch
It has never been resolved what exactly IP means in such a context, nor to what extent NFT projects can bestow IP rights onto their holders. Those unanswered questions bubbled back to the surface this week, when Yuga Labs—the multi-billion dollar company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club—announced that it planned to bestow exclusive commercial rights onto holders of Moonbirds.
Source: Moonbirds Copyright Controversy Exposes Flaws in Crypto’s IP Obsession – Decrypt
A group of newspapers is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of effectively stealing—and profiting from—journalists’ work. This could well be an existential legal fight. Some of Silicon Valley’s tech barons are openly hostile to journalism, dreaming of the day when it can be “disrupted” or rendered obsolete. To do so, however, they may have to get through copyright law first.
SAG-AFTRA will license Nielsen‘s streaming content data, which the union will to enforce the terms of its 2023 contract with Hollywood studios. Under the deal for Nielsen’s Streaming Content Ratings, SAG-AFTRA will have “an objective source of domestic viewership data for original streaming programming,” the parties announced.
Source: SAG-AFTRA Will Use Nielsen Data as Part of Enforcing Studio Pact on Streaming Content
Today’s big news: Universal Music Group and TikTok, by way of a joint announcement, have confirmed that they have struck a new licensing deal – three months after UMG pulled its recordings catalog from the service. What does this new deal mean for UMG and its artists and songwriters? Standout headline: More money. Reminder: according to Universal, TikTok’s royalty payouts to UMG prior to this new deal constituted just 1% of UMG’s total revenues.
The report calls for the UK to pass new laws that would protect artists’ personalities from being copied by AI without permission; mandate transparent labelling of AI-generated content; and require AI developers to gain permission from copyright holders to use their materials for training, among other things.
Source: UK lawmakers call for AI legislation to protect artists from deepfakes, copyright infringement