As first reported by the Financial Times, independent labels Beggars Group, Secretly Group, and Partisan Records are pushing back against Apple’s preferential payouts for spatial audio. They say independent artists who can’t afford to record in spatial audio would make less because of how streaming music payouts work. Apple said artists on Apple Music can get bonuses of up to 10 percent for creating music with spatial audio.
Source: Indie labels cry foul over Apple Music’s enhanced spatial audio royalties
Nightshade, a new, free downloadable tool created by computer science researchers at the University of Chicago designed to be used by artists to disrupt AI models scraping and training on their artworks without consent, has received 250,000 downloads in the first five days of its release. It’s a strong start for the free tool, and shows a robust appetite among some artists to protect their work from being used to train AI without consent.
The legal disputes around the development of AI are serious business. But when thinking of these suits, an old adage comes to mind: this isn’t about justice, this is about the law. And the legal questions swirling around AI in this moment are less about what’s broadly fair and more specifically about fair use—which, to many authors and publishers, is only sometimes fair.