A report published by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Music has called for the government to craft a “pro-creative industries AI Bill” with protection for copyright and creators at its core. That conclusion should come as no surprise given that the report was researched and funded by music industry body UK Music, whose July 2023 position paper on AI had previously set out its wishlist for the government.
Source: UK music report: ‘AI can be a great servant but would be a terrible master’
Google has been hit with a new copyright lawsuit in California federal court by a group of visual artists who claimed the Alphabet opens new tab unit used their work without permission to train Imagen, its artificial-intelligence powered image generator. The case is one of many potential landmark lawsuits brought by copyright owners against tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta over the data used to train their generative AI systems.
The technology is a vexed topic in the literary world. Many authors are concerned about the use of their copyrighted material in generative AI models. At the same time, some are actively using these technologies — even attempting to train AI models on their own works. These experiments, though limited, are teaching their authors new things about creativity.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has proposed new customer verification requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers. The goal of the ‘Know Your Customer’ regime is to prevent fraud and abuse, including piracy. In response to this plan, prominent rightsholders want the department to expand the proposal’s scope to include domain name registrars and registries. Ideally, they argue, domain companies should also be required to take down pirate domains.
Last week, Concord – partly financed by Apollo Global Management – launched a USD $1.511 billion cash bid for the portfolio of Hipgnosis Songs Fund. That was the equivalent of USD $1.25 per share. Today (April 29), Blackstone and HSF’s board have jointly announced a new offer from Blackstone worth around$60 million more than Concord’s latest bid.