At industry events publishers fume about the broken bargain with Google, which historically scraped and copied their entire websites at no charge in exchange for sending them substantial amounts of traffic. Now that referral traffic is drying up. At events most agree that publishers must unite to strike a new collective bargain with Google based on a universally applied fair payment for content model. But privately many are signing secret deals with Google that provide them with cash and (a little) referral traffic in the short-term.
Source: The prisoner’s dilemma: Why UK publishers are signing Google AI deals
Spotify has signed a licensing agreement with Merlin, the digital licensing partner for independent labels and distributors, for its upcoming fan-made covers and remixing tool. The tool will let fans create covers and remixes of songs from participating Merlin members’ artists and songwriters. It will launch as a paid add-on for Spotify Premium users, and according to the company, “will create an additional revenue stream for participating artists”.
According to Gallup, seven in 10 Americans now say they are somewhat or extremely knowledgeable about AI, up from 64% in 2024. But as familiarity has grown, so has skepticism. More Americans now believe AI does more harm than good, expect it to reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade, and are less likely to trust businesses to use the technology responsibly.
Google has begun giving publishers a prominent “Top Stories” plug above many news-based queries which generate an AI Overview summary. While the move could lead to more referral traffic for publishers, they could lose the opportunity to feature in these snippets if they opt out of allowing their content to be used in AI Overviews.
After the Supreme Court’s Cox ruling reshaped ISPs piracy liability, the record labels behind a $46.8 million verdict against Grande Communications are ready to walk away from the case entirely. Grande won’t let them, however. The Internet provider is holding out for a formal win and the millions in bond costs it says the appeal ran up.
On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.
Germany’s GEMA has notched another AI legal victory – this time over Suno, which the Munich Regional Court has reportedly ordered to disclose its revenue and pay damages. Meanwhile, the music-generation startup is set to appeal. GEMA touted its “groundbreaking success” today, after suing Suno closer to 2025’s start. Additionally, although legal documents themselves aren’t usually made available to the public in Germany, the Munich Regional Court provided a detailed breakdown of its decision.
Just as printed letters can be scanned and converted into digital text, emerging technology can transform sheet music into sound. A new effort is underway to use optical music recognition (OMR) to bring to life music in the public domain for all to listen and access through the Internet Archive. Nearly 200 public domain songs have been uploaded to the Internet Jukebox—from John Philip Sousa marches to children’s folk songs and piano concertos by Frederic Chopin—and the collection is growing.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act has entered into force. Enterprises running generative AI tools now have to comply with Article 50, which requires providers and deployers of certain AI systems to tell people when they’re interacting with a machine, and to mark AI-generated content so it can be flagged as such. Providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video, or text face a separate duty under Article 50. Marking is the mechanism. The output needs a machine-readable mark, detectable as artificially-generated or manipulated.
On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its