The Australian government has announced plans for a levy on tech giants designed to incentivise them to do commercial deals with publishers. The News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) would require large search and social media services to pay 2.25% on their Australian revenue. This money would be “distributed back to the news media sector”, the government said, to “support the employment and critical work of journalists”.
Source: Australia to tax Meta if it doesn’t pay news publishers
Google is trying to put an end to the copyright liability claim in its textbook piracy battle with several academic publishers. In a motion for partial judgment filed in a New York federal court, Google argues that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Cox v. Sony has effectively killed the copyright liability arguments. That is, unless the publishers can prove Google specifically “induced” infringement or built a service “tailored” exclusively for piracy.
Source: Google Uses Cox Ruling to Kill Last Copyright Claim in Textbook Piracy Lawsuit
Futures Music Group, the independent label group founded in 2024 by Neon Gold’s Derek Davies and Avenue A’s Dave Wallace, has raised $6 million in seed funding from a group of music industry investors in the US and UK. Commenting on the investment, Blackburn said: “From an artist perspective, what matters most is having partners with great relationships and smart technology, who also understand the creative and don’t force a rigid system onto it.
Source: Indie label group Futures Music raises $6m as it sets sights on catalog deals
In five years, the major music companies will not only be scouring the web for AI infringement, they will also be issuing legal letters directly to the perpetrators… using AI. Sound far-fetched? It isn’t. It’s sitting inside a pair of patent applications published by the US Patent and Trademark Office on February 12, 2026. What the filings describe is a sprawling end-to-end “media rights platform” that sits between rightsholders, generative AI systems, and the end users who want to prompt AI.
Source: How will the major labels overcome the copyright threat from AI music? AI itself.
UMG has been building a patent portfolio around AI-music infrastructure, through a partnership with IP asset management, investment, and advisory firm Liquidax Capital. The technology, depending on how it is commercially deployed, could potentially support a so-called ‘walled garden’ approach to AI-generated music derivatives, among other possible applications, which currently remain unclear.
Source: Inside the UMG-backed patent portfolio targeting AI music derivatives
UK media leaders grappled with five key challenges facing the news industry at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Trends event in London on Wednesday. The elephant in the room was the promise of AI content marketplaces which could start seeing publishers rewarded for the growing AI-powered news audience. There were no easy solutions on offer, but plenty of individual success stories.
Source: AI content marketplaces can’t come soon enough for news publishers
For many software companies, as well as authors, artists and musicians, the risk is not just direct copying. It’s that the market for their work could be flooded with A.I.-generated substitutes that cost almost nothing to produce. “What happened with the Claude Code leak is essentially a preview of what’s coming for every creative industry,” said Russ Pearlman, a lawyer specializing in A.I. and technology. Existing copyright rules, he said, were built on the assumption that copying takes time and that there’s a meaningful window to take action to protect a work.
Source: Anthropic’s Leaked Code Tests Copyright Challenges in A.I. Era
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue. Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
Source: YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
UMG and the other music companies urged a federal judge last month to find that Anthropic’s use of its intellectual property was not “fair use” — a legal tenet that excludes “transformative” uses of a work from copyright protection. Now the AI giant is hitting back, saying in a Monday (April 20) brief of its own that the publishers cannot “meaningfully dispute that training on lyrics (and other copyrighted text) is transformative.”
Source: Anthropic Argues for Fair Use in UMG’s AI Lawsuit: ‘Training on Lyrics Is Transformative’
News publishers have disputed a claim from Google that using their content to “fine-tune” its AI models contains “no realistic prospect of harm” to them. Google told the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority that there is “no realistic prospect of harm to publishers in respect of training/fine-tuning of AI models for search and search generative AI features. “Fine-tuning helps the model learn how to process information rather than what current information to display.”