Harlequin has announced a multi-year agreement with Dashverse, an AI entertainment company specializing in shortform video, to co-produce a slate of 40 animated microdramas inspired by Harlequin Romance titles beginning next month. In a note to PW, Harlequin EVP and publisher Brent Lewis declined to answer questions about the specifics of the deal. He said that authors will receive royalties from the videos, which will be monetized via ads and, on certain platforms, subscriptions.
Global streaming subscription revenue surpassed $150 billion for the first time in 2025, according to a new survey from Ampere Analysis, which highlighted that as “a major milestone” for the subscription market. And streaming subscription revenue will hit $202 billion by 2030, up 29 percent, “as streamers shift focus from subscriber growth to price increases and ad-supported tiers.”
Source: Global Streaming Subscription Revenue Tripled In Five Years, Poised to Top $200 Billion by 2030
With OpenAI’s purse strings tightening ahead of its IPO, company executives began taking a more critical look at Sora—and didn’t like what they saw. The research team there was about to begin a training run for a new model meant to power video-generation in ChatGPT. Unlike language models, which learn from text, video models have to make sense of entire moving worlds, making them far more expensive to create. After running the numbers on how much it would cost, OpenAI decided to cancel it.
Source: The Sudden Fall of OpenAI’s Most Hyped Product Since ChatGPT
By the numbers, said payment consists of the maximum $150,000 a pop in statutory damages for 48 Warner Music recordings as well as 50 recordings apiece for Sony Music and Universal Music – or $22.2 million total. And the label litigants further spelled out that “if needed,” they could identify a multitude of their works in the 86 million tracks that Anna’s Archive allegedly scraped from Spotify.
Source: Major Labels Seek ‘Extremely Conservative’ $322 Million in Damages from Anna’s Archive
Capitol CMG, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing, BMG Rights Management and Essential Music Publishing filed a motion on March 26 in the US Middle District of Louisiana asking the court to substitute them as defendants in place of Robert Resnik, who sold his asserted 25% stake in Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love) to the publishers on March 20. The publishers said in the filing that they acquired Resnik’s stake as they seek to ask the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s January ruling.
Source: Publishers acquire stake in song at center of termination rights case; plan SCOTUS challenge
As this recent report highlights, more than 1,000,000 UK businesses use machine learning but, contrary to the hype, most will not be using GenAI models and virtually none creating music.In the modern world, where everything we do with online material involves a copy being made of it by a computer and its network, how we define the scope of copyright law has major consequences for our ability to harness the full potential of digital technologies.
Source: Copyright maximalism will stifle a research-intensive digital economy
If a Cox subscriber used broadband to pirate a novel, Cox did not build its network to enable that outcome. When a user prompts an AI model to write in the style of Cormac McCarthy or generate a sonnet that reads like Shakespeare, the system was built explicitly to fulfill that request. Under Judge Thomas’s framework, that distinction could matter enormously.
Source: SCOTUS’s Cox Ruling Could Impact Publishers’ Fight Against AI
The decision establishes a clear rule that contributory copyright liability requires inducement of infringement or provision of a service tailored to infringement. Mere knowledge that a service is being used for infringement, even coupled with a failure to terminate the infringing user, is insufficient. This provides significant protection for ISPs and other general-purpose service providers.
Source: SCOTUS Copyright Decision a Big Win for ISPs and, Potentially, Other Digital Players
Filed on Monday in San Jose federal court, the publishers push back against tech companies’ continued claim that “fair use” applies to copying millions of copyrighted works without authorization to train AI models. Their case argues that Claude’s AI-generated lyrics are by definition derivatives of the publishers’ lyrics and “compete with and dilute the market” for them. “The evidence in this case is overwhelming,” the filing asserts, adding that Anthropic has “committed copyright infringement on a massive scale.”
Source: Major Publishers Make a Decisive Legal Strike Against Anthropic’s ‘Limitless AI Rip-Offs’
The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with internet provider Cox Communications, holding that it cannot be held liable for music piracy even if it did not take adequate steps to curb the copyright infringement. The justices, in a 9-0 ruling, were weighing in on a lengthy legal fight between Cox and Sony Music Entertainment, which had sought huge damages against the internet provider for not blocking service to those who egregiously downloaded protected works.
Source: Supreme Court Limits Liability of ISPs for Music Piracy