On News Corp.’s fiscal first-quarter earnings call, CEO Robert Thomson said that the company is in “advanced discussions” with companies to license its content for their AI engines. “We are in advanced discussions with a range of digital companies that we anticipate will bring significant revenue in return for the use of our unmatched content sets,” Thomson said.
Source: News Corp. CEO Expects “Significant” Revenue From AI Companies That License Content
Experts question why studios aren’t siding more with actors and writers and against AI companies to oppose what could constitute the mass pilfering of their closely guarded intellectual property. “Studios should be protecting their copyrights,” a WGA member tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s shortsighted, because it demotes them to another source of content for these AI firms.”
Source: As AI Battle Lines Are Drawn, Studios Align With Big Tech in a Risky Bet
OpenAI — bowing to peer pressure — today announced it’ll step in and defend businesses using OpenAI products if they face claims around copyright infringement as it pertains to OpenAI apps and services. As part of a new program, Copyright Shield, OpenAI says that it’ll pay the legal costs incurred by customers who face lawsuits over IP claims against work generated by an OpenAI tool.
Source: OpenAI promises to defend business customers against copyright claims | TechCrunch
Spotify has told industry players that it expects the new 1,000-play minimum annual threshold will reallocate tens of millions of dollars per year from 0.5% of its current royalty pool to the other 99.5%. In 2024, Spotify expects this will move $40 million that would have previously been paid to tracks with fewer than 1,000 streams to those with more than 1,000 streams.
Spotify’s new royalty model is the latest attempt to try to bring streaming royalties in line with the dynamics of todays’ streaming market. It has many laudable objectives and intentions, but there is no escaping the threat perceived by artists and companies that operate in the long tail. With many of those artists set to no longer collect even paltry royalty statements, the question is what those artists will do next.
Source: How Spotify’s new model could accelerate a forking of music
Though politicians in the United States appear increasingly intent on creating a federal legal framework to regulate AI-generated deep fakes—and courts in countries including India have already come down on the matter, siding against AI deep fake creators—not all other world governments have been similarly aggressive in their efforts to control the novel technology.
Source: Celebs Like Scarlett Johansson Declare War on AI Deep Fakes—Are They Doomed? – Decrypt
Kobalt has today (November 1) announced a new partnership with investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value to invest more than USD $700 million to acquire music copyrights over the next few years. As part of the venture, Kobalt will manage the creative, synch, licensing, administration, and investment services for the copyrights.
Source: Morgan Stanley is investing more than $700m to buy music copyrights in partnership with Kobalt
The News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents more than 2,200 publishers released research on Tuesday that it said showed that developers outweigh articles over generic online content to train the technology, and that chatbots reproduce sections of some articles in their responses. The group argued that the findings show that the A.I. companies violate copyright law.
Source: News Group Says A.I. Chatbots Heavily Rely on News Content
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) reports that it has now distributed over $1.5 billion in royalties to songwriters in the past two and half years since launching full operations. As of Monday (October 30), the MLC said it has already met every milestone set by Congress in the MMA and distributed over $1.5 billion in royalties.
Source: The MLC has paid out over $1.5bn to songwriters to date
Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have hit a stumbling block in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems, with a federal judge’s dismissal of most claims. Claims against the companies for infringement, right of publicity, unfair competition and breach of contract were dismissed, though they will likely be reasserted.
Source: Artists Lose First Round of Copyright Infringement Case Against AI Art Generators