The Authors Guild, the largest and oldest professional organization for writers in the United States, is teaming with a new start-up, Created by Humans, to help writers license rights to their books to artificial intelligence companies. The partnership, announced Wednesday, comes as authors and publishers are wrestling with the rapid incursion of artificial intelligence into the book world.
Source: Can a Start-Up Help Authors Get Paid by A.I. Companies?
If rights holders don’t want their content to be used for the training of language models, they must attach a legally compliant, machine-readable usage reservation (TDM opt-out) to their content. “Effective immediately, all ebooks and audiobooks distributed by Bookwire,” the company says in its statement, “will be equipped with a TDM opt-out notice in ONIX data. Additionally, the TDM opt-out is stored in the metadata of all EPUBs that we deliver via the TDMRep protocol.”
Source: Frankfurt Countdown: Bookwire Offers ‘Protection’ From Wrongful AI Usage
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), the entity that collects mechanical royalties in the US, has announced it has distributed nearly $2.5 billion in royalties since it began operations three-and-a-half years ago. That’s up by roughly $1 billion in just the past year (The MLC reported in October 2023 that it had distributed $1.5bn in royalties) and up by almost $500 million since March,
Source: The MLC nears $2.5bn in royalty distributions to songwriters and publishers since 2021
With the growth of Netflix and other streamers, top creators are starting to feel the loss of the long-tail income from syndication runs and international licensing, which is now limited to streamers with global scope such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Max and Disney+. Despite eye-popping upfront fees paid to top creative talent, the loss of annuity-like income from successful TV shows and movies has hit Hollywood hard in the pocketbook.
Source: Netflix Chief Doubles Down on Streamer’s Dealmaking Terms and Limited Theatrical Release Strategy
As streamers evolve their acquisition strategy in Europe, producers and broadcasters are finding new opportunities as well as challenges. “Back in 2020, 60% of the top 10 shows on Netflix were originals, and now, 60% of the top 10 shows are acquisitions, licensed in from AMC and others,” says Guy Bisson, executive director and co-founder of Ampere Analysis. The change reflects the “fundamental shift in attitudes towards licensing.”
OpenAI’s head of media partnerships has said it does not currently intend to share SearchGPT ad revenue with publishers. But he added that the matter was “an evolving space for us right now” and that it was in OpenAI’s interests to provide enough value to stop publishers opting out of appearing in SearchGPT results.
Source: OpenAI exec rules out sharing revenue from SearchGPT with publishers, for now
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, a type of recurrent neural network, are adept at analyzing sequential data, making them ideal for detecting temporal manipulations in audio. Even transformer models, the technology behind advanced language AI like ChatGPT, are being applied to audio analysis, processing long sequences of audio data to identify complex patterns and relationships that might escape other systems.
Source: AI vs. audio pirates: catching sophisticated copyright evasion with AI
According to TME: “We believe AI should be a supportive tool rather than a substitute for musicians creating original works. We implement compliance assessments and continuous monitoring of AI products and operations to ensure that AI-generated musical content is properly licensed and musicians’ creative works are fully protected.”
As the engine powering the world’s digital artists, Adobe has a big responsibility to mitigate the rise of AI-driven deepfakes, misinformation, and content theft. In the first quarter of 2025, Adobe is launching its Content Authenticity web app in beta, allowing creators to apply content credentials to their work, certifying it as their own.
Source: Adobe has a new tool to protect artists’ work from AI
It’s too soon to say how the spate of deals between AI companies and publishers will shake out. OpenAI has already scored one clear win, though: Its web crawlers aren’t getting blocked by top news outlets at the rate they once were. The generative AI boom sparked a gold rush for data—and a subsequent data-protection rush (for most news websites, anyway) in which publishers sought to block AI crawlers and prevent their work from becoming training data without consent.
Source: The Race to Block OpenAI’s Scraping Bots Is Slowing Down