The Songwriters Guild of America (SGA), the Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL), and Music Creators North America (MCNA) have released a joint statement addressing request for comments on the proposed AI Action Plan by the Trump administration. Together, they propose a legislative solution that would include establishing sui generis rights for music creators to control the use of their works on generative AI platforms.
Source: Is a Blanket Music Licensing System Ahead for GenAI?
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system “DABUS” was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.
Source: US Appeals Court Rejects Copyrights for AI-Generated Art Lacking ‘Human’ Creator
More than 30 performing arts leaders in the UK, including the bosses of the National Theatre, Opera North and the Royal Albert Hall, have joined the chorus of creative industry concern about the government’s plans to let artificial intelligence companies use artists’ work without permission. They also urged the government to support the “moral and economic rights” of the creative community in music, dance, drama and opera.
Source: Performing arts leaders issue copyright warning over UK government’s AI plans
On London Book Fair’s opening day, Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said the AAP would be filing its response imminently in response to the Trump administration’s call for public input. And in the same session, Dan Conway, CEO of the UK’s Publishers Association, told us that there’s no result known as yet from the consultation period, nor a sense for how long an outcome may be in coming.
Source: AI: Publishers Warn White House of ‘a Bloated Fair-Use Defense’ and an ‘Unworkable Opt-Out Regime’
The $19 billion academic publishing industry is adopting AI-powered tools to improve the quality of peer-reviewed research and speed up production. The latter goal yields “obvious financial benefit” for publishers, one expert said. Since the start of the year, Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature have all announced the adoption of generative AI–powered tools or guidelines, including those designed to aid scientists in research, writing and peer review
Source: Publishers Adopt AI Tools to Bolster Research Integrity
OpenAI is asking the U.S. government to make it easier for AI companies to learn from copyrighted material, citing a need to “strengthen America’s lead” globally in advancing the technology. The proposal is part of a wider plan that the tech company behind ChatGPT submitted to the U.S. government on Thursday as part of President Donald Trump’s coming “AI Action Plan.”
Source: OpenAI urges U.S. to allow AI models to train on copyrighted material
People appear to be using Google’s new Gemini model to remove watermarks from images, according to reports on social media. Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model’s image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit image content. It’s a powerful capability, by all accounts. But it also appears to have few guardrails.
Source: People are using Google’s new AI model to remove watermarks from images | TechCrunch
Eric Shamlin, Television Academy governor and chair of its AI Task Force, urged members to take on an advocacy role in developing AI policies and frameworks, during a keynote at Saturday’s TV Academy AI Summit. “We must now lead,” he asserted. “We can’t afford to sit back and wait for others to shape how AI is implemented into our industry.”
Source: ‘We Must Now Lead’ Warns TV Academy Governor Eric Shamlin at AI Summit
Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau is one of the most established comic artists working today, he’s worked for Marvel, DC Comics and game publishers including Capcom and Square Enix. but the issues around generative AI and art haven’t escaped him. For Stanley, AI and its uses in art is a straightforward one – AI isn’t art, it can’t make art, and it isn’t creative. “I don’t agree that AI images are art,” Stanley states firmly.
Amid all the arguments about AI and copyright, it’s encouraging to see some companies making ethical training part of their launch pitches. An example outside music this week is Moonvalley, a US startup that has just unveiled its Marey AI video model. It’s billed as “the first fully clean AI model” with the company claiming it has only been trained on “owned or fully licensed source data”.
Source: Moonvalley’s Marey AI-video model was trained on licensed content