Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers’ content to create AI summaries that damage their business. The lawsuit comes from Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum.
Source: Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries | TechCrunch
To get a sense of how complicated it is to grant an AI company a license to train its algorithm on copyrighted work, imagine for a moment that you run a European collecting society that distributes royalties to songwriters and publishers. For the sake of this example, let’s say that this organization is called COMPLEX (the Cooperative for Original Music Publishing Licensing Excellence) and that it represents public performance and mechanical rights for the fictional country of Freedonia.
Source: What Would An AI Music License Even Look Like? It’s Complicated
OpenAI has taken a significant step into entertainment by backing Critterz, the first animated feature film generated with GPT models. Human artists sketch characters and scenes, while AI transforms them into moving images. The $30 million project, expected to finish in nine months, is far cheaper and faster than traditional animation and could debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026.
Source: AI-generated film sparks copyright battle as it heads to Cannes | Digital Watch Observatory
A new system called Real Simple Licensing would allow AI companies to license training data at a massive scale — if they’re willing to pay for it. According to RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard, the goal was to create a training-data licensing system that could scale across the internet. “We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet,” Walther told TechCrunch. “That’s really what RSL solves.”
Source: RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing | TechCrunch
STIM, the Swedish collective management organization, announced today (Sept. 9) that it has signed what is thought to be the first collective management license for AI music. The deal, signed with the AI music company Songfox with support from the attribution technology company Sureel, will start small, using both compositions and recordings from a publisher that owns compositions as well as recording rights. But STIM’s ambitions are bigger.
Source: STIM Explores AI Music Licensing Framework With Songfox Deal: ‘This Is a Blueprint’
Apple is the latest tech company to be hit with a proposed class action lawsuit over unauthorized training of AI models using published books. On Friday, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a lawsuit in Northern California targeting Apple’s “OpenELM” large language models, alleging the company “copied protected works without consent and without credit or compensation.” T
Reservoir Media has acquired a majority interest in the Miles Davis publishing catalog, as well as as well as other rights associated with the late jazz icon’s estate, including a partnership in name and likeness opportunities and certain rights to his recorded music, the company announced early Tuesday. The deal includes 90 percent of Davis’s music publishing rights and of the estate’s income from his recordings.
Source: Miles Davis’ Publshing Catalog Acquired by Reservoir Media
US-based royalty rights org SoundExchange has filed an appeal following its devastating loss in a lawsuit against SiriusXM stemming from allegedly unpaid royalties. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the PRO’s lawsuit against SiriusXM last month, ruling that Congress never granted it authority to file lawsuits on behalf of rights holders for whom it collects royalties.
Source: SoundExchange Officially Appealing Its Loss Against SiriusXM
The federal judge overseeing Anthropic PBC’s proposed $1.5 billion copyright settlement is concerned class lawyers are striking a deal behind the scenes that will be forced “down the throat of authors.” Judge William Alsup at the hearing said the motion to approve the deal was denied without prejudice, but in a minute order after the hearing said approval is postponed pending submission of further clarifying information.
Source: Anthropic Judge Blasts $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement (2)
Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit after it downloaded a massive trove of pirated books to train its large language models. The settlement amounts to about $3,000 per book, and is believed to be the largest ever recovery in a U.S. copyright case, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
Source: Anthropic to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Book Piracy Class Action Lawsuit