Sci-Hub has launched its own SCI token through which it hopes to unlock more paywalled research. The controversial shadow library, which is used by millions of researchers around the globe, sees this as the next step to decentralize science and reward knowledge sharing. Whether this pirate ‘tokenomics’ works in practice has yet to be seen.
Source: Sci-Hub’s Crypto Coin Aims to Power a New Era of ‘Open’ Science * TorrentFreak
Scraping activity has jumped 18% in the past year, according to Cloudflare, an internet services company. The outcome of the copyright fights and technical efforts to curb free scraping could have a seismic impact on the future of the media industry—and the internet at large. Publishers are essentially trying to fence off swaths of the web while AI companies argue that the material they are scraping is fair game.
Source: The AI Scraping Fight That Could Change the Future of the Web
Between Luma Labs’ Dream Machine launched in June 2024, OpenAI’s Sora in December, Runway AI’s Gen-4 in March 2025, and Veo 3 in May, the sector has crossed several milestones in just a few months. Lionsgate vice president Michael Burns told New York Magazine about the possibility of using artificial intelligence to generate animated, family-friendly versions from films like the “John Wick” or “Hunger Games” franchises, rather than creating entirely new projects.
Source: AI video becomes more convincing, rattling creative industry
The team at Moonvalley, a Los Angeles-based AI video-generation startup, doesn’t think you can prompt your way to making a movie. That’s why the company on Tuesday opened up its “3D-aware” model to the public, promising a “hybrid” approach that gives filmmakers more control than other standard text-to-video models.
Source: Moonvalley’s ‘ethical’ AI video model for filmmakers is now publicly available | TechCrunch
The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted — in a new revision to their Spotify bio — what was obvious to experts and non-experts alike: their music is, in fact, AI-generated. “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” the band bio now reads.
Source: AI ‘Band’ the Velvet Sundown Officially Confirm They’re AI — and a ‘Provocation’
A legal complaint has been submitted to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority over the impact of Google AI Overviews on news publishers. A collaboration between tech justice non-profit Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance and the campaign group Movement for an Open Web aims to “stop Google stealing the work of British journalists”.
Source: Urgent bid lodged with UK regulator to stop Google AI Overviews ‘stealing journalism’
Internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare is now blocking all AI scrapers accessing content by default in an industry first. The move has been backed by more than a dozen major news and media publishers including the Associated Press, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Conde Nast, DMGT, Dotdash Meredith, Fortune, Gannett, The Independent, Sky News, Time and Ziff Davis. Cloudflare said its default setting for new domains is now to block AI crawlers that don’t have permission or provide compensation.
Source: UK and US publishers back move to block AI scrapers by default
Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between website owners and AI companies — ideally giving publishers greater control over their content. It’s called Pay per Crawl, and Cloudflare is launching the “experiment” in private beta on Tuesday.
Source: Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping | TechCrunch
Outlaw country artist Aventhis is verified on Spotify – where just over a million (1.072M) listeners absorb his work each month. He’s even popular enough to have one of those official Spotify-generated ‘THIS IS… Aventhis’ playlists under his name. And his music? It’s gaining traction, with the blues-soaked, 2025-released Mercy On My Graver racking up more than 2 million plays. Aventhis isn’t real. Neither is his voice. He, and it, are both AI-generated.
Source: The AI music problem on Spotify (and other streaming platforms) is worse than you think
The battle between technology heavyweights and many of the country’s most famous creative companies and artists is playing out in Washington and in court. At stake are billions of dollars and precedents that could shape the future of AI and U.S. copyright law. While the fight is far from over, some in creative industries fear it might be too late to stop the advance of AI as it roils their professions.
Source: Hollywood Confronts AI Copyright Chaos in Washington, Courts