At an April 8 summit on AI, held in Washington, D.C., by the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Alliance, Vermont senator Peter Welch and former Virginia representative Bob Goodlatte, among others, stressed that copyright protections should not be dismantled to accelerate AI development.
Source: Politicians Assert U.S. Constitution Mandates Protecting Creativity
A report this week by CMU claimed that Suno’s ReMi lyrics model was “spitting out entire sets of lyrics to well-known songs in response to simple prompts”, including works by Eagles, Midnight Oil and Bush. Now songwriters body The Ivors Academy has called for Suno to remove ReMi from its platform due to those claims. “Suno’s new tool is the latest example of unethical AI firms stealing the work, art and livelihoods of lyricists, songwriters and composers,” said CEO Roberto Neri.
Source: Ivors Academy slams Suno over lyrics-regurgitation claims
A group of prominent intellectual property law professors has weighed in on the high-stakes AI copyright battle between several authors and Meta. In an amicus brief, the scholars argue that using copyrighted content as training data can be considered fair use under U.S. copyright law, if the goal is to create a new and ‘transformative’ tool. This suggests that fair use could potentially apply to Meta’s training process, even if the underlying data was obtained without permission.
Source: Training AI Using ‘Pirated’ Content Can Be Fair Use, Law Professors Argue * TorrentFreak
Ministers are planning a fresh round of reviews they hope will mollify lawmakers nervous about controversial plans to overhaul U.K. copyright laws to facilitate AI innovation. The reviews will focus on finding technical ways to allow creators to easily and effectively “opt out” from AI companies training models on their work without permission and have more clarity about when their work has been used. However, technical solutions could take several months to emerge.
Source: UK plans fresh round of talks to take sting out of AI copyright proposals
Tony Blair’s thinktank has urged the UK to relax copyright laws in order to let artificial intelligence firms build new products, as it warned a tougher approach could strain the transatlantic relationship. “Without similar provisions in the United States, it would be hard for the UK government to enforce strict copyright laws without straining the transatlantic relationship it has so far sought to nurture.”
Source: UK needs to relax AI laws or risk transatlantic ties, thinktank warns
A group of European authors, performers and other rightsholders have issued a joint statement slamming the third draft of the European Union’s GPAI (General-Purpose Artificial Intelligence) Code of Practice. A coalition of creatives said the third draft is “completely unacceptable” as it “undermines the objectives of the AI Act, contravenes EU law and ignores the intention of the EU legislator,” according to their statement published on Friday (March 28).
Berlin-based BMG reported $497 million/€459 million (up 11.1% YoY) in revenue for 2024’s opening half. Like with the majors’ financials, acquisitions are factoring into the numbers. Among different things, BMG dropped approximately $540 million/€500 million on some 24 catalogs as well as signings during 2024, with 10 of the catalog deals having wrapped in H1, higher-ups disclosed.
Source: BMG Reports Over $1B in 2024 Revenue Amid Distribution Pivot
Pophouse Entertainment, the Sweden-based music investment firm co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, has raised over EUR €1.2 billion (USD $1.3 billion) for its debut fund. The Stockholm-based company announced Monday (March 31) that Pophouse Fund I raised over €1 billion ($1.1 billion), reaching its hard cap and making it, “one of the largest first-time private equity funds to be raised in Europe in the last decade”.
Source: Pophouse Entertainment, the firm behind ABBA Voyage, closes $1.3bn music rights buying fund
The penultimate draft of the European Union’s AI Code of Practice has a blind spot: it only limits copyright compliance requirements to web crawling. This narrow focus ignores other data collection methods—such as torrenting—potentially creating loopholes in AI training data regulations.
Source: Is Web Scraping the Only Copyright Concern for AI? – Open Future
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI’s request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper’s content without permission or payment. In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case’s main copyright infringement claims to go forward.
Source: Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward