In an open letter, BBC director-general Tim Davie, Financial Times CEO Jon Slade, The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson, Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, and Telegraph Media Group CEO Anna Jones have invited “global leaders across publishing, broadcasting, media and news” — to join as founding members of SPUR (the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition).
Source: U.K. News Organizations Form Media Coalition Over AI Publishing Rights
Despite a legal obligation to publish a summary in line with the template provided by the European Commission’s AI Office, the likes of OpenAI, Google, and xAI have failed to do so. As Zuzanna Warso and Paul Keller from Open Future have noted, some companies have published a paragraph or two about training data along with other model documentation. It is not even close to what they are legally mandated to publish
Source: How Big AI Developers are Skirting a Mandate for Training Data Transparency
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Thomson said News Corp has a “woo and a sue strategy.” He explained: “We’ll woo you, we’d like you to be our partner, but if you’re stealing our stuff we are going to sue you. And if you look at a lot of the bots coming in and scraping our stuff and they’re using our material in new AI verticals, we’re coming for you.
Source: News Corp CEO Robert Thomson warns AI companies scraping without paying: ‘We’re coming for you’
The Authors Guild announced it has expanded its “Human Authored” certification program beyond its own membership to any author whose books are published in the United States. The certification program, which launched in beta for Guild members in January 2025, allows authors and publishers to place a trademarked seal on books to signal that the text was written by a human rather than generated by artificial intelligence.
Source: Authors Guild Expands ‘Human Authored’ Certification Program
The acquisitive company confirmed on Wednesday (March 4) that it has invested more than $500 million across acquisitions, advances, and other growth initiatives over the past 12 months alone. Create said that this M&A activity has positioned it “as a scaled co-owner and operator of enduring music businesses with global reach”.
Source: Create Music Group, at $2.2 billion valuation, completes $450 million fundraise
The accelerator is the work of a company called Prose Ventures, founded by veteran investor and founder Jules Miller, who decided to make the demo day a public event on Twitch to counter some of the current narrative about AI musicmakers. “There’s a lot of noise around AI music, and the only way to understand it is to listen – to the music and to the real people behind it doing serious creative work,” said Miller.
Source: AI-music artists get their own accelerator from Prose Ventures
Robert Kyncl has published a letter to Warner Music Group shareholders that pushes back against any under-appreciation of WMG’s value in the financial market, while talking up AI’s potential to drive that value higher. Both WMG and Universal Music Group shares are currently trading significantly below their 52-week peaks. Last Tuesday (February 24), a telling analyst note from Rothschild & Co Redburn argued that music rightsholders are particularly “exposed” to threats from AI-generated content.
Source: Robert Kyncl tells WMG shareholders: AI is music’s next growth engine, not its downfall
Perplexity wrote to a New York judge last week arguing the News Corp subsidiaries should be forced to hand over records showing the hundreds of queries they made to “fish” for a basis to sue within its AI search tool before launching the claim in October 2024. Perplexity told Judge Katherine Failla: “This discovery would reveal an inconvenient truth: Plaintiffs repeatedly and deceptively crossed the line from investigation to entrapment.”
Source: Perplexity claims News Corp tried to ‘entrap’ chatbot to make copyright case
Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery is not just a Hollywood deal. Powered by $24 billion from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the proposed merger is sparking debate over soft power, influence and media independence at a company that includes CNN and HBO. Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) are jointly putting up a total of $24 billion investment into the Hollywood mega merge
Source: Paramount’s $110 Billion Warner Bros. Deal Backed by Arab Sovereign Funds
Sarandos gave the interview to Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg, where he didn’t mince words about losing out to Paramount. “It’ll be fascinating to see the next steps. I have been on the record a lot in the last two weeks talking about what I think the future looks like. I’m confident in our future that we’re not impacted by all that. In fact, maybe it’s to our advantage. But I hope I’m wrong for the sake of the industry.”
Source: Sarandos: Paramount Offers Were ‘Irrational’ Relied on Political Pressure