In recent weeks, Meta, Google, OpenAI and others have asked the Trump administration to block state A.I. laws and to declare that it is legal for them to use copyrighted material to train their A.I. models. They are also lobbying to use federal data to develop the technology, as well as for easier access to energy sources for their computing demands. And they have asked for tax breaks, grants and other incentives.
Source: Emboldened by Trump, A.I. Companies Lobby for Fewer Rules
Built for distribution, not attribution, today’s digital infrastructure fails to recognize authorship—let alone enforce it. That failure is now compounding. With AI models scraping everything from novels to music samples, intellectual property has become an open secret: valuable, vulnerable, and increasingly invisible. Story wants to change that. Not by issuing takedown notices or clamping down on remix culture—but by reprogramming IP itself.
Source: Reprogramming IP: Story Builds A Blockchain For The AI Era
As we move closer to an April 5 deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company, AI startup Perplexity has once again thrown its hat into the ring as a potential buyer. “All of society benefits when content feeds are liberated from the manipulations of foreign governments and globalist monopolists,” it says. Perplexity didn’t announce where the funding would come from for the acquisition.
Source: AI Startup Perplexity Wants to Buy TikTok, Open Source the ‘For You’ Feed
In a closely watched battle between music publishers and AI developer Anthropic, a California court has denied a request to halt the use of copyrighted song lyrics with its refusal to grant a preliminary injunction. The court ruled that the music publisher failed to demonstrate immediate and irreparable harm, while the scope of the requested restrictions was “ever-expanding.”
Source: Anthropic Scores Preliminary Victory in AI-Copyright Clash Against Music Companies * TorrentFreak
In a significant executive shuffle announced Monday, OpenAI is expanding COO Brad Lightcap’s responsibilities while CEO Sam Altman shifts his attention more toward the company’s technical direction. Lightcap will now “oversee day-to-day operations,” international expansion, and manage key partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft and Apple, according to Bloomberg.
National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) head David Israelite just recently emphasized the stat, “one of the craziest” he’s seen, in a LinkedIn post. By now, many are aware of Spotify’s audiobook-bundling embrace, which is fueling significant royalty effects in the music world. And to put it mildly, the situation isn’t sitting right with songwriters and publishers.
Source: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Made More From Stock Sales Last Year Than All US-Based Songwriters Combined
UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has reiterated the government’s stance on AI copyright policy, urging critics not to “resist change” as discussions continue. The proposal, which would require creators to actively opt out if they do not want their work included in AI training datasets, has drawn criticism from musicians, filmmakers, and media organisations.
Source: UK Technology Secretary defends AI copyright plans amid industry backlash
Cloudflare, a global network service that helps some of the biggest websites in the world deliver content to users, has devised a new plan to deal with AI companies’ web scrapers. And the idea is as positively devious as it is ingenious. Basically, bots that don’t follow the rules laid out for them via protocols such as robots.txt, a simple text file that lays out what web crawlers are allowed to do on a site, will be messed with in order to waste the time and resources of the company in charge of the bot.
Source: One company’s devious plan to stop AI web scrapers from stealing your content
Can internet service providers be held liable for pirating subscribers? Internet provider Grande Communications asked the Supreme Court to review this key question. With no clear standards for handling copyright infringement notices, internet service providers are caught between a rock and a hard place, Grande argues. In its petition, the ISP highlights the need to resolve the “scattershot” approach to ISP liability, seeking a more defined and workable solution.
Source: Supreme Court Asked to Resolve ISP’s Copyright Piracy Conundrum * TorrentFreak
The Independent is to launch a news service which it said will use Google AI tools to summarise its journalism for “time-poor audiences”. The publisher says all content written for the service, named Bulletin, will be “reviewed and checked” by journalists before publication and seven people have been hired to staff it. The service will use Google‘s Gemini AI model to re-write the Independent’s own articles, the publisher said, alongside its own “in-house data and development teams”.
Source: Independent launching AI-powered news service for ‘time-poor audiences’