Rights

As labor disputes in Hollywood over the use of generative AI technology has brought film and TV production to a halt, groups representing collective rights management organizations for authors, composers and performers are looking to bring their case to halls of governments around the world. On Thursday (July 20) a group of 10 organizations including CISAC, ECSA and SCAPR, released an open letter spelling out seven principles they are asking policymakers to commit to as they adopt policies and legislation regarding AI.

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Five Asian collection societies and SESAC Music Group have entered into what they call a “historic collaboration for the music industry in Asia”. The group of societies have formed The Asian Alliance Music Rights Organization (AAMRO), a music rights hub established to manage music licensing and royalty distribution of the combined repertories of FILSCAP (Philippines), WAMI (Indonesia), MACP (Malaysia), MCT (Thailand), and VCPMC (Vietnam).

Source: SESAC partners with five Southeast Asian collection societies to form multi-territorial digital licensing hub

In a joint press release, TikTok and Warner clarify that the new “multi-year, multi-product” deal will see WMG license its recordings and publishing repertoire to TikTok and TikTok Music. The new deal will enable “WMG and TikTok [to] find new ways to harness TikTok’s revenue generation and promotional capabilities,” as well as facilitating “new fandom development and monetization features.”

Source: TikTok and Warner Music Group sign ‘first of its kind’ multi-year licensing deal 

Two photographers who filed a copyright lawsuit against Instagram after their images posted to the platform appeared on BuzzFeed News and Time via embedding, have lost their case. In an opinion handed down Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit referenced its 2007 ‘server test’ precedent, noting that Instagram could not be liable for secondary copyright infringement because when content is embedded, no copy is made of the underlying content.

Source: Instagram Not Liable For Copyright Infringement Over Embedded Images * TorrentFreak

Authors have now joined the growing ranks of concerned creators suing tech developers over their much-hyped generative AI technology. And a pair of copyright class action suits recently filed on behalf of authors is raising broader questions about the most effective way to protect creators and creative industries—including authors and publishers—from the potentially disruptive aspects of AI.

Source: Authors Join the Brewing Legal Battle Over AI

The Internet Archive has taken the rather unusual step of sending a DMCA notice to protect the copyrights of book publishers and authors. The non-profit organization asked GitHub to remove a tool that can strip DRM from books in its library. The protective move is likely motivated by the ongoing legal troubles between the Archive and book publishers.

Source: Internet Archive Targets Book DRM Removal Tool With DMCA Takedown * TorrentFreak

The Associated Press on Thursday said it reached a two-year deal with OpenAI, the parent company to ChatGPT, to share access to select news content and technology. The deal marks one of the first official news-sharing agreements made between a major U.S. news company and an artificial intelligence firm. As part of the deal, OpenAI will license some of the AP’s text archive dating back to 1985 to help train its artificial intelligence algorithms.

Source: AP strikes deal with OpenAI

The dispute involves so-called neighboring rights: a form of copyright protection that extends to the performers, producers or broadcasters of copyrighted material, not only its original author. Under an EU directive of 2019, now part of French law, the concept allows news publishers to claim remuneration for any reproduction of their content in digital form.

Source: French news groups take Twitter to court over digital copyright

Alphabet’s Google was accused in a proposed class action lawsuit on Tuesday of misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems. The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court by eight individuals seeking to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, said Google’s unauthorized scraping of data from websites violated their privacy and property rights.

Source: Google hit with class-action lawsuit over AI data scraping

Shutterstock today announced that it plans to expand its existing deal with OpenAI to provide the startup with training data for its AI models. Over the next six years, OpenAI will license data from Shutterstock including images, videos and music as well as any associated metadata. Shutterstock, in turn, will gain “priority access” to OpenAI’s latest tech and new editing capabilities.

Source: Shutterstock expands deal with OpenAI to build generative AI tools