AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Source: Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images | TechCrunch
YouTube channels from major news publishers and creators were in video data sets used by Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Runway, and Bytedance. For example, 11,604 videos from the official YouTube channel of The New York Times across 11 different data sets are in the database. Over 8,000 of these videos, though, came from a single training data source — Runway Gen-3.
Universal Music has unveiled a partnership deal with Stability AI, which is set to develop a suite of music creation tools with the major. Ultimately, said tools will advance “responsible innovation that supports both artists and rightsholders while preserving the integrity of the art form,” according to the companies. While those companies opted against shedding light on the products’ specifics, they did emphasize an objective of putting out “fully licensed, commercially safe AI music tools.”
Source: Universal Music Group Announces Stability AI ‘Strategic Alliance’
Universal Music Group said on Wednesday it has settled a copyright infringement case with artificial intelligence company Udio and that the two firms will collaborate on a new suite of creative products. Under the agreement, the companies will launch a platform next year that leverages generative AI trained on authorized and licensed music.Source: Universal Music settles copyright dispute with AI firm Udio
Spotify faces a new class action lawsuit that alleges the company has “turned a blind eye” to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming” on its platform. The lawsuit suggests that the use of bots is widespread on Spotify, but the only example it cites pertains to Drake. Filed in California District Court last night with rapper RBX (who is a cousin of Snoop Dogg) named as the lead plaintiff, the lawsuit alleges that foul play has led to Drake’s exorbitant streaming numbers.
Source: Class Action Against Spotify Over ‘Mass Fraudulent’ Drake Streams
OpenAI has suffered a legal setback in its copyright battle, as a federal judge ruled that authors can pursue claims the company unlawfully downloaded their books. U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein denied OpenAI’s motion to strike what the company characterized as a new “download claim” in a ruling Monday, finding that prior complaints adequately notified OpenAI of infringement allegations based on downloading and reproducing copyrighted books.
Source: SDNY Judge Denies OpenAI Bid To Strike Authors’ Book-Download Claim – Decrypt
In a memorandum filed in a federal court in New York on Friday (October 24), lawyers for the record labels said Udio’s motion “mischaracterizes” the labels’ legal arguments “and the legal landscape.” The labels, representing all three of the major recording companies, amended their complaint against Udio in September, adding allegations that the AI company “illegally scraped” YouTube videos in order to collect content on which to train its AI models.
The debates about how AI technology should be regulated continue, with the latest views coming from a group of organizations and heirs representing musicians who are no longer alive – Bill Withers, Cass Elliott, David Rose and Alex North included. Gathered by veteran attorney Chris Castle and the Artist Rights Institute, they have made a joint filing to the White House’s consultation on AI regulation, which has been fielding the views of tech giants and music-industry bodies alike.
Source: Musicians’ heirs hit out at AI deepfakes as ‘digital grave robbing’
The “Creative Commons” model of copyright licensing is inextricably linked with the rise of the internet since the early 2000s. However, the advent of generative AI is proving a stress test to its philosophy of the open sharing of creative work. Large Language Models harvest public content at scale, often stripping out any reference to the original creator and ignoring their wish to share their work reciprocally.
Large online services such as Google and X should pay copyright fees when they display extracts from newspaper articles, says a Swiss parliamentary committee. However, the House of Representatives Committee for Transport and Telecommunications (KVF-N) wants to refer the corresponding bill back to the government and is calling for AI specific regulation. The new ancillary copyright for media and media professionals will therefore probably have to be dealt with once again by the national government.
Source: Swiss lawmakers back media copyright fees for digital giants