The Weeknd is looking to raise roughly USD $1 billion in financing backed by his music catalog. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reported on Saturday (August 23), citing people familiar with the matter as saying that the Canadian singer would pledge his stake in publishing rights and master recordings. No agreement has been reached as discussions are still ongoing, the report said.
Source: The Weeknd seeks $1B in music-backed financing (Report)
As the September 1 deadline nears to submit books for consideration in the class action lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, the Authors Guild is advising its members to send their contact information and titles to the court-appointed class counsel for authors. In its post, the Guild advises authors who believe pirated copies of their books may have been unlawfully downloaded by Anthropic to provide the requested information and “to share the website with any other authors you know.”
Source: Authors Guild Urges Members to Register Titles in Anthropic Lawsuit
Hollywood productions are enraptured by the sound of the U.K. scene. Experimentalist Jerskin Fendrix landed an Academy Award nomination for Poor Things (2023), as did Mica Levi for The Zone of Interest that same year. A24’s upcoming The Smashing Machine (Oct. 3), starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Emily Blunt, will feature music from London-based alt-jazz star Nala Sinephro.
Source: Brits Are Scoring Big: How U.K. Acts Took Over Hollywood’s Biggest Soundtracks
ASCAP has settled its lawsuit with thousands of radio stations over music licensing rates, the PRO and the Radio Music License Committee announced. Hours after rival BMI announced it had reached such a deal with RMLC, ASCAP said that it, too, had settled its own parallel lawsuit against the radio group. Like BMI’s statement, the announcement from ASCAP said the deal had secured substantially higher rates for songwriters and publishers.
Source: ASCAP Settles Lawsuit With Thousands of Radio Stations Over Music Licensing Rates
BMI and the Radio Music License Committee have reached a settlement to resolve three years of litigation over the licensing rates that will be paid by nearly 9000 radio stations to songwriters and publishers – a deal that BMI is calling “a historic rate increase.” According to court filings, the new deal will see rates paid by radio stations jump from 1.78 percent of revenue under the old agreement to 2.14 percent, then slowly increase to 2.20 percent by the end of the term.
Source: BMI Settles With Radio Stations to Resolve License Litigation: ‘Historic Rate Increase’
Publishers including Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023 for copyright infringement, alleging that its Claude chatbot regurgitated copyrighted lyrics, indicating the company had trained the chatbot on those lyrics without permission. Now the music publishers additionally allege that Anthropic hid the fact that it used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted lyrics, lawyers for the publishers said in a document filed on Monday (August 11) with the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Source: Music publishers allege Anthropic used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted lyrics
The agreement marks Spotify’s latest direct deal with a prominent music publisher and moves its agreement with Kobalt beyond the traditional CRB model in the US. This means that Kobalt’s direct deal supersedes the audiobook ‘bundling‘ payment structure that, starting in March last year, saw Spotify dramatically cut the rate of mechanical royalties paid to publishers and songwriters in the US.
Source: Kobalt inks direct licensing deal with Spotify in the US
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper by circulation, has sued the generative AI startup Perplexity for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in Tokyo District Court on August 7, marks the first copyright challenge by a major Japanese news publisher against an AI company. Yomiuri alleges the scraping has been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries without authorization.
Source: Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, sues AI startup Perplexity for copyright violations
Major academic publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, are trying to unmask the operators of several shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library and Libgen. They’re also targeting SLUM, a third-party uptime monitor for these unofficial libraries. A DMCA subpoena, issued by a D.C. federal court, requires Cloudflare to hand over identifying user data for possible legal action.
Source: Publishing Giants Escalate War on ‘Shadow Libraries’ With Broad Cloudflare Subpoena * TorrentFreak
Universal Pictures is taking a new approach to combat mass theft of its movies to teach artificial intelligence systems. Starting in June with How to Train Your Dragon, the studio has attached a legal warning at the end credits of its films stating that their titles “may not be used to train AI.” It’s also appeared on Jurassic World Rebirth and Bad Guys 2.
Source: Universal Pictures to Big Tech: We’ll Sue If You Steal Our Movies For AI