Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers’ content to create AI summaries that damage their business. The lawsuit comes from Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum.
Source: Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries | TechCrunch
Let’s assume you’re a casual user. There are now a range of high-end tools that allow pro video makers to insert video generation models into their workflows. But most people will use this technology in an app or via a website. You know the drill: “Hey, Gemini, make me a video of a unicorn eating spaghetti. Now make its horn take off like a rocket.” What you get back will be hit or miss, and you’ll typically need to ask the model to take another pass or 10 before you get more or less what you wanted.
To get a sense of how complicated it is to grant an AI company a license to train its algorithm on copyrighted work, imagine for a moment that you run a European collecting society that distributes royalties to songwriters and publishers. For the sake of this example, let’s say that this organization is called COMPLEX (the Cooperative for Original Music Publishing Licensing Excellence) and that it represents public performance and mechanical rights for the fictional country of Freedonia.
Source: What Would An AI Music License Even Look Like? It’s Complicated
By the order of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Shira Perlmutter remains the register of copyrights and the director of the U.S. Copyright Office, despite the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to oust her. Circuit judges Florence Y. Pan and J. Michelle Childs concurred that Perlmutter may stay in her role for now. Circuit judge Justin R. Walker dissented.
Source: On Appeal, Copyright Chief Shira Perlmutter Keeps Her Job
OpenAI has taken a significant step into entertainment by backing Critterz, the first animated feature film generated with GPT models. Human artists sketch characters and scenes, while AI transforms them into moving images. The $30 million project, expected to finish in nine months, is far cheaper and faster than traditional animation and could debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2026.
Source: AI-generated film sparks copyright battle as it heads to Cannes | Digital Watch Observatory
A new system called Real Simple Licensing would allow AI companies to license training data at a massive scale — if they’re willing to pay for it. According to RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard, the goal was to create a training-data licensing system that could scale across the internet. “We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet,” Walther told TechCrunch. “That’s really what RSL solves.”
Source: RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing | TechCrunch
Crucially, the term “general-purpose AI” (GPAI) did not emerge from within the AI research community. It is a legal construct introduced by the EU AI Act to retroactively define certain types of AI systems. Prior to this, ‘GPAI’ had little to no presence in scholarly discourse. The Act not only assigned a regulatory meaning to the term, but also effectively created a new category – one that risks distorting how such systems are actually understood and developed in practice.
Source: A False Confidence in the EU AI Act: Epistemic Gaps and Bureaucratic Traps | TechPolicy.Press
STIM, the Swedish collective management organization, announced today (Sept. 9) that it has signed what is thought to be the first collective management license for AI music. The deal, signed with the AI music company Songfox with support from the attribution technology company Sureel, will start small, using both compositions and recordings from a publisher that owns compositions as well as recording rights. But STIM’s ambitions are bigger.
Source: STIM Explores AI Music Licensing Framework With Songfox Deal: ‘This Is a Blueprint’
Henna Virkkunen, EVP of the European Commission responsible for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, is upbeat about the E.U.’s ties with the U.S. when it comes to the media and entertainment sectors. Virkkunen underlined the need “to make sure that we have a level playing field,” noting that the EU’s creative sector “is facing many challenges” with the onset of “digitalization and very big online platforms.”
For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” Google submitted the filing ahead of another trial that will determine how it will address its monopoly in the advertising technology business.