Patronus AI on Wednesday released research showcasing how often leading AI models produce copyrighted content. “We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, said. “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4 produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”
Rights
Music royalties trading platform JKBX launches with approval from the SEC
JKBX has announced that it has received qualification from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its assets. The result: as of this week, investors – including consumers aka ‘retail investors’ – can legally purchase shares in the royalty streams of hits via JKBX.com. The JKBX platform soft-launched last year, but while awaiting SEC qualification, its users could only ‘reserve’ (rather than outright buy) these royalty shares.
Source: Music royalties trading platform JKBX launches – with regulatory approval from the SEC
Why Musicians Are Doubling Down on an Unlikely Venue to Reach New Listeners
Artists are signing deals with game companies to debut new songs through interactive events and as background music for games themselves, in some cases weeks before those tracks are released on the likes of Spotify. Artists are also selling virtual goods featuring their likenesses and music for players’ avatars.
Source: Why Musicians Are Doubling Down on an Unlikely Venue to Reach New Listeners
Bryan Ferry Partners With Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists
The deal sees the company acquiring 50% of Ferry’s sound recording, publishing, and name, image and likeness rights from his solo work and Roxy Music catalog, which reaches back to the group’s galvanizing 1972 debut album and includes such hit songs as “Love Is the Drug,” “More Than This,” “Avalon,” “Virginia Plain,” “Dance Away,” “Slave to Love” and more. Further terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Three Publishing Veterans Form a New House, Authors Equity
Madeline McIntosh, Nina von Moltke, and Don Weisberg—most recently at Penguin Random House US and Macmillan, respectively—have joined forces to form a new publishing company. As its name implies, the publisher will operate outside of traditional publishing business models, offering no advances but paying authors a high percentage of a book’s profits—a model followed by some other types of hybrid publishers.
Source: Three Publishing Veterans Form a New House, Authors Equity
Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s assets are now valued at $690 million less than they were before
According to an investor update from HSF’s board, Shot Tower estimates the fair value of HSF’s portfolio (as of March 1, 2024) at between USD $1.80 billion and $2.06 billion (or between $1.74 billion and $2.00 billion after contingent catalog bonuses are deducted). According to the HSF board, the midpoint of Shot Tower’s valuation of HSF is $1.93 billion, which represents a reduction in value of 26.3% vs. that $2.62 billion valuation from Citrin Cooperman (as of September 30).
OpenAI claims New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit
OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.” “The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” OpenAI said. “The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.”
Source: OpenAI claims New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit
Tumblr is selling user data to train AI. Things could get weird.
Auttomatic, the company that owns WordPress and Tumblr, is making a deal to provide data from their sites to help train OpenAI and Midjourney. “We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control,” an Auttomatic blog post says. “Our partnerships will respect all opt-out settings.”
Source: Tumblr is selling user data to train AI. Things could get weird.
Universal Music Deploys the ‘Nuclear Option’ Against TikTok
The companies are battling over how much TikTok pays Universal—the world’s largest music company—to make the label’s vast catalog of songs available to one billion-plus social-media users worldwide. The fight escalated this week, with Universal bringing on what many in the industry call “the nuclear option”—requiring TikTok to take down songs on which any songwriter signed to Universal’s publishing division has a credit.
Source: Universal Music Deploys the ‘Nuclear Option’ Against TikTok
ASCAP Reports Record Collections, Distribution
ASCAP collections grew 14.1% to $1.737 billion in 2023 and payouts to songwriters and publishers increased 14.7% to $1.592 billion, the performance rights organization reported Wednesday (Feb. 28). Those figures represent a record year for ASCAP in both revenue buckets, as well as all-time highs for any U.S. performance rights organization ever, ASCAP claimed.
Source: ASCAP Reports Record Collections, Distribution While Casting Shade on For-Profit Competitors