Independent music licensing group Merlin and Spotify have renewed their global, multi-year licensing partnership. According to the companies, the agreement, announced on Tuesday (September 30), “reinforces the vital role of independent music on Spotify and provides Merlin members continued access to a platform that reaches fans worldwide”.
Source: Spotify and Merlin ink multi-year global licensing deal
OpenAI began alerting talent agencies and studios about the forthcoming product and its opt-out process over the past week and plans to release the new version in the coming days, the people said. The opt-out process for the new version of Sora means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright material in videos the tool creates.
Source: OpenAI’s New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out
Hallwood Media signed a deal with Telisha “Nikki” Jones after negotiations that purportedly included an offer of $3 million, Billboard reported. Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist “Xania Monet” whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000 views on Instagram – despite her likeness, vocals, and music being AI-generated.
Source: What happens when an AI-generated artist gets a record deal? A copyright mess
U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works. “This is a fair settlement,” Alsup said, though he added that distributing it to all parties will be “complicated.”
Source: Judge approves $1.5 billion settlement over AI company Anthropic’s alleged use of pirated books
Kirsty Innes, recently appointed as a special adviser to Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, said “whether or not you philosophically believe the big AI firms should compensate content creators, they in practice will never legally have to”. Innes has deleted the statement, which she posted to X in February. In the deleted posts, seen by the Guardian, she said: “A lot of this has already happened and it can continue to happen outside the UK, whatever our laws say.”
Source: Adviser to UK minister claimed AI firms would never have to compensate creatives
In France, the apparent use of artificial intelligence to clone an actor’s voice for video game character Lara Croft has fans and actors up in arms. “We’ve addressed this issue by removing all AI voiceover content,” Aspyry’s post said. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.” Still, the affair has triggered alarms in the voiceover community, with campaigners saying it’s a sobering example of dangers that AI poses to human workers and their jobs.
Source: AI-cloning of Lara Croft’s voice has ‘Tomb Raider’ fans and actors up in arms
Microsoft is in talks with select U.S. publishers about a pilot program to help launch a two-sided marketplace that would compensate publishers for their content used by AI products, starting with its Copilot assistant. Microsoft would become the first major tech company to build an AI marketplace for publishers, a milestone in building a sustainable business model for content companies in the AI era.
Source: Microsoft looks to build AI marketplace for publishers
An alliance of media and digital organizations have filed a complaint with Germany’s Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) against Google’s AI Overviews. It is the second instance this week of pushback against AI Overviews, following The Hollywood Reporter and Variety publisher Penske Media Corp becoming the first news publisher to sue Google over the product’s negative impact on traffic and revenue.
Source: German media groups file complaint against Google AI Overviews
The major music companies have escalated their copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music generation company Suno, filing an amended complaint that alleges the startup illegally “stream ripped” copyrighted recordings from YouTube to train its AI models. The timing of the new allegations appears directly connected to Anthropic’s recent USD $1.5 billion settlement with authors, who claimed the service obtained pirated books to train its AI models.
In response to the judge’s concerns over the preliminary settlement reached in class action lawsuit charging AI giant Anthropic with copyright infringement, attorneys representing authors have filed materials they hope will clear up any confusion. At the top of Judge Alsup’s list were concerns about how the $1.5 billion settlement would be paid out to authors and publishers as well as whether attorneys for the authors had conducted a vigorous enough campaign to alert all authors about the lawsuit and their options.
Source: Attorneys File Reply to Questions Raised in Anthropic Settlement