The United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) are celebrating the introduction of the Living Wage for Musicians Act, led by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, to Congress. The bill, shared with Digital Music News on Wednesday (March 6th), would create a new streaming royalty and help ensure that artists and musicians can build sustainable careers in the age of streaming.
Source: Rashida Tlaib Introduces New Bill to Fix Streaming Royalties
While DALL-E developer OpenAI is busy fighting with Elon Musk, the creators of two other notable image generation AIs, Midjourney and Stability AI, seem to have sparked a beef of their own over the most ironic thing imaginable, considering the nature of the companies involved – image theft. It is claimed that employees from Stability AI infiltrated Midjourney’s database and stole all prompt and image pairs, an action that also caused a 24-hour outage.
Source: Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft, Bans Its Employees
Music streaming giant Spotify announced today (March 7) that it will be raising subscription prices in France in response to the recent implementation of a new government tax on music streaming services. This decision comes after months of contention between the company and the French government, with Spotify arguing the tax unfairly burdens consumers and hinders its ability to operate in the market.
Source: Spotify to increase subscription prices in France to ‘offset’ new music streaming tax
The adult site is facing new obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA), including strict requirements on age verification. The new rules apply to what the EU designates a Very large Online Platform (VLOP) – which Pornhub says it is not. “We believe the European Commission erred in its calculation of our user numbers”, the firm said. To be designated a VLOP, a site needs to be visited by more than 45 million Europeans on average every month – a threshold the EU says Pornhub meets.
It will be months, if not years, before the usefulness and the unintended consequences of the EU legislation will become clear, but already the DMA has forced tech giants, from Alphabet to TikTok, to change how they operate in the EU or face the threat of hefty fines. First-time DMA offenders can be penalized up to 10 percent of their company’s total worldwide turnover.
Source: Europe Enters New Era of Tech Regulation With Digital Markets Act
The statement comes in the face of multiple publishers in the industry withdrawing their catalogs from the short-form video platform and denying the renewal of a licensing deal. “Whether or not indie publishers are provided with the opportunity to continue with the current license model or not, there are a few issues that need to be addressed,” the statement begins.
The standoff between TikTok and Universal took a turn when the National Music Publishers Assn., which reps many indies, said it does not plan to renew. If more publishers join in — the two other major companies, Sony and Warner Chappell, have not yet done so — it would mean more music will vanish from the platform and more artists and songwriters will see their livelihoods impacted.
Patronus AI on Wednesday released research showcasing how often leading AI models produce copyrighted content. “We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, said. “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4 produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”
OpenAI said Wednesday it intends to dismiss all claims made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit and suggested that the billionaire entrepreneur didn’t really have that much impact on its development and success. In a blog post, the Microsoft-backed startup revealed that since its inception in 2015, it had raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his initial commitment to provide as much as $1 billion in funding. “Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” OpenAI wrote.
The EU has designated six companies as gatekeepers, which it defines as large digital platforms providing “core” services like app stores, search engines, and web browsers. The DMA’s restrictions apply to specific services within these companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. Here’s what each has been doing to meet — and fight — those demands.
Source: The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding