In its second report on connected technology, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee warns that the Government’s original plan to exempt text and data mining by AI from copyright protection risks reducing arts and cultural production to mere ‘inputs’ in AI development and shows a clear lack of understanding of the needs of the UK’s creative industries.
Source: Abandon AI copyright exemption to protect UK creative industries, MPs say
Microsoft-backed OpenAI took aim at what it called “ancillary” claims in the lawsuits on Monday, telling the court that the text ChatGPT creates does not violate the authors’ rights in their books. OpenAI has also denied the authors’ core allegation that the use of their books to train ChatGPT infringes their copyrights, but it did not ask the court to dismiss those claims on Monday.
Source: OpenAI asks court to trim authors’ copyright lawsuits
On Friday, Judge Martha M. Pacold of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against rapper Future in 2021. The lawsuit claimed that Future’s 2018 track, “What I Think About It,” rips off an earlier song by a little-known Virginia rapper. The judge said in her ruling that the plaintiff was trying to sue over lyrics synonymous with hip-hop.
In 1498, less than 50 years after Johannes Gutenberg revealed the printing press, a savvy entrepreneur named Ottaviano Petrucci received a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing musical notation with one of these new-fangled machines, giving him a monopoly on sheet music. He controlled the copyright and publishing of all music.
The block on GPTBot can be seen in the robots.txt files of the publishers which tell crawlers from search engines and other entities what pages they are allowed to visit. “Allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety,” OpenAI said in a blogpost that included instructions on how to disallow the crawler.
Source: New York Times, CNN and Australia’s ABC block OpenAI’s GPTBot web crawler from accessing content
Word Collections, the digital rights management company founded by music entrepreneur Jeff Price, has secured $5 million in funding from investors led by Metallica’s Black Squirrel Partners. The funds will be used to accelerate Word Collections’ global direct licensing business and to further develop its proprietary music-identification and tracking technology, the company said in a statement issued on Thursday (August 24).
Source: Word Collections secures $5m in funding from investors led by Metallica’s Black Squirrel Partners
Google is signaling that it will pay off the music industry with special deals that create brand-new — and potentially devastating! — private intellectual property rights, while basically telling the rest of the web that the price of being indexed in Search is complete capitulation to allowing Google to scrape data for AI training.
Source: Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright
YouTube announced today how it plans to approach the impact AI technology is having on the music industry with regard to its video hosting platform and its existing partnerships across the music industry, including with artists, labels and other rightsholders. While the company is bullish on AI’s potential to “enhance music’s unique creative expression,” it also says it needs to ensure the integrity of artists’ work is protected.
Source: YouTube is working on a plan to compensate artists and rightsholders for AI music | TechCrunch
Performance Rights Organization BMI is engaging with outside parties over the possibility of a sale, as the organization seeks to continue its transition into a for-profit entity. But where those profits will come from is of concern to several groups that advocate on behalf of songwriters, who sent an open letter to BMI CEO Mike O’Neill addressing the issue on Friday (Aug. 18).
Source: Songwriter Groups Question BMI’s For-Profit Plans in Letter to CEO
Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance has taken down the prominent “Books3” dataset, that was used to train high-profile AI models including Meta’s. A takedown notice sent on behalf of publishers prompted “The Eye” to remove the 37GB dataset of nearly 200,000 books, which it hosted for several years. Copies continue to show up elsewhere, however.
Source: Anti-Piracy Group Takes Prominent AI Training Dataset ”Books3′ Offline * TorrentFreak