For a hundred years the music business ran on scarcity. A small head of hits drove most of the revenue, and the engine was simple: protect the hits, ignore the rest. Streaming did not break that. It made the head bigger. Drake alone accounts for more of Spotify than the bottom fifty thousand artists combined. Generative music breaks it for real, but not in the way the doomsayers think.
The application, made with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on June 24, covers the group saying: “Hi, we’re the Backstreet Boys.” It takes a page from Taylor Swift’s playbook, after the pop star applied to register her voice saying “Hey, it’s Taylor” in April. If the mark is granted, it would give the group an additional means of contesting AI-generated imitations of their voices online: content that has grown cheaper and easier to produce as the technology improves.
Source: Backstreet Boys file to trademark their voices, joining Taylor Swift and Lionel Richie
Music streaming service TIDAL is the latest to take aim at AI-generated music with the introduction of a new policy that will prevent fully AI-generated music from making money on its platform. In addition, TIDAL will use automated tools to remove AI-generated music that attempts to impersonate an artist or a group, the company said.
Source: TIDAL cracks down on AI music by cutting off monetization
Google has said it is exploring new “value exchange models” with publishers and accepted the need for independent regulation of AI. The tech giant’s paper, A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America, has defended the use of publicly available online content for training AI models, but said it is “piloting novel ways to partner with websites whose content meaningfully contributes to the freshness and factuality of generative AI responses”.
Source: Google accepts need for ‘new value exchange’ with publishers
The Copyright Act grants authors the exclusive right “to display the copyrighted work publicly,” and that right has proven remarkably resistant to resolution in the internet context. Courts across the country have been unable to agree on a deceptively simple question: when a website embeds an image that lives on someone else’s server, and that image appears on a visitor’s screen, who has displayed it?
Source: Is Embedding Someone Else’s Image Copyright Infringement? The Fifth Circuit May Finally Tell Us
US artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” extracting its Claude AI model’s capabilities. In a letter sent to two members of the US Congress, the San Francisco-based company said operators linked to Alibaba carried out almost 29 million exchanges with Claude using thousands of fraudulent accounts in what it called the largest extraction campaign of its kind.
Source: Anthropic accuses Chinese rival Alibaba of illicitly extracting AI capabilities
Looks like the AFM’s lawsuit against Universal Music and Warner Music was just the beginning. Now, 29 organizations are calling on labels and publishers to prioritize “meaningful consent, fair remuneration and full transparency” in their AI licensing agreements. Those organizations, repping artists, songwriters, and music managers alike, today voiced several pressing concerns in an open letter. In their view, as gen AI pacts continue to pour in, creatives themselves “are not being meaningfully consulted” despite being “the primary holders of many of the rights at stake.”
Source: 29 Organizations Call on Labels and Publishers to End ‘Default Opt-Ins,’ ‘Forced AI Clauses,’
On Sunday, Getty Images said it has entered into a partnership with OpenAI. The deal will see images from Getty’s licensed content libraries surface in OpenAI search results and “discovery experiences within ChatGPT.” “High‑quality, licensed visual content makes AI‑powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy,” Getty CEO Craig Peters said in a statement. “This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that, and together we will deliver richer visual experiences to ChatGPT users.”
Source: Getty Images makes a surprise deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI
The country’s parliament enacted a revised Copyright Act on Wednesday (June 17), introducing what the government calls the record performance and communication right. Until now, only songwriters, composers, and music publishers were paid when commercially released music was played as background music in Japanese venues. The performers and the labels behind those recordings received nothing for the public plays, at home or overseas.
Source: Japan passes copyright reform giving performers royalties when recordings play in public
The major music companies and BMG have asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that lets songwriters reclaim the worldwide rights to their songs under American law. In a petition filed on June 11, the rightsholders warned that the decision would unleash “chaos” on the industry if left to stand, and asked the justices to reverse a January ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Source: Majors and BMG ask US Supreme Court to overturn copyright termination ruling