Country music star Garth Brooks is considering a sale of his catalog, eyeing roughly $2 billion for the rights to his songs and recordings, according to people familiar with the matter. Brooks, an album sales and touring juggernaut, is seeking a price that would be among the largest deals for an individual artist or group’s catalog. He would sell both his publishing, or songwriting, and recorded music rights.
Source: Garth Brooks Considers Sale of Music Catalog, Seeking Roughly $2 Billion
Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman wrote in a blog post on Wednesday (June 3) that, “as with our previous funding rounds,” the Series D saw “participation from some of the best artists, producers, songwriters, and people from across the music industry.” He didn’t name any of them. The funding more than doubles Suno‘s valuation from the $2.45 billion it achieved after closing a $250 million Series C round seven months ago in November.
Source: Suno raises over $400 million, pushing valuation to $5.4 billion
The company behind ChatGPT has no plans to share advertising revenue with publishers, OpenAI’s vice president of media partnerships has confirmed. Varun Shetty was asked at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille on Tuesday whether they are considering a revenue share model on publisher content being surfaced next to adverts, which are being trialed on ChatGPT. Shetty responded: “Not at this point.”
Source: OpenAI not planning to share advertising revenue with publishers
Google has processed billions of DMCA takedown requests during the first months of the year. Reporting agency Link-Busters remains the top sender. While its dominance remains, the company appears to have hit a takedown ceiling of roughly 70 million URLs per week. Google won’t confirm whether there’s a limit on the notices it processes and says that trusted parties “can submit the quantity they need.”
Source: Google’s Top DMCA Sender Plateaus at 70 Million Takedowns Per Week
Google must allow news sites to opt out of having their online content scraped to feed AI overviews and other artificial intelligence services and features for British users, regulators said Wednesday. The Competition and Markets Authority said it was ordering Google to give online publishers the option, in what it called a “world first.”
Source: UK Orders Google to Allow Publishers to Opt Out of AI Scraping for Search Summaries
The “Cox effect” continues to ripple across the music industry litigation landscape. In the latest development, Anthropic has shrugged off vicarious liability in the newer copyright infringement suit it’s facing from major music publishers including Concord. Judge Eumi K. Lee just recently signed a related order, thereby approving the publisher plaintiffs’ voluntary dismissal of a vicarious infringement claim without prejudice.
Source: Anthropic Brushes Off Vicarious Infringement Claims In Music Publishers’ Copyright Suit
Martin Scorsese, the living embodiment of cinema as high art and a conscience for modern Hollywood, on Tuesday threw his weight behind an A.I. start-up that specializes in image generation. In a statement and an accompanying video made in his New York City office, Mr. Scorsese discussed how he had used technology from Black Forest Labs, a fast-rising A.I. venture, during preproduction for a new film. Black Forest Labs said Scorsese had signed on last year as a partner and an adviser.
All authors are influenced – consciously or unconsciously – by what they have read or seen before. In fact, this has often been seen as one of the defining features of literary creation. Seneca the Younger argued that, just as bees make honey and wax from the pollen of flowers they leave behind, so writers should craft new works from the materials they encounter in their reading. As T.S. Eliot wryly put it, ‘immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. This being so, can we really draw such a line between literary borrowing and AI-powered appropriation?
Some have contended that AI may be having its Napster moment, when the music file-sharing software upended the economics and gatekeeping structures of the music industry in the late 90s by enabling millions of users to download and distribute copyrighted songs online. Now, generative AI is forcing book publishing into a long overdue reckoning over what counts as original human work and how the tech should be ethically deployed or disclosed at all stages of the book production pipeline.
Source: Book publishing’s AI panic is here. And nobody knows what to do about it
The complaint, filed on Monday (May 18) in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division, accuses the defendants of continuing to exploit 49 Lead Belly compositions after the estate served formal copyright termination notices. The lawsuit also alleges that an audit of the defendants’ books uncovered more than $289,000 in wrongfully retained royalties. The plaintiff, Terika Dean, is the appointed Trustee of The Huddie Ledbetter Family Trust, according to the complaint.
Source: Estate of Blues pioneer Lead Belly sues group of publishers in copyright dispute