PPL, the UK’s collective management organization (CMO) for performers and recording rightsholders, recorded the highest revenue in its 90-year history in 2024. Revenue for the year rose 6% year-on-year to GBP £301 million (USD $384.4 million at the average exchange rate for 2024) from the previous record of £283.5 million ($352.6 million) set in 2023.
Source: UK collection org PPL’s 2024 revenue jumps 6% to record $384M
Today’s refined GPT-4o model makes it easier for consumers, and businesses, to create more life-like images and paragraphs of comprehensible text—and even company logos and slide decks, OpenAI said. Behind the improvement to GPT-4o is a group of “human trainers” who labeled training data for the model—pointing out where typos, errant hands and faces had been made in AI-generated images.
Source: OpenAI Claims Breakthrough in Image Creation for ChatGPT
A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta’s alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors’ request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta’s request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of ‘pirate’ library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.
The fundamental problem of licenses undermining libraries and scholarly research remains, even as technology and business models shift. Today, some publishers are attempting to implement new contractual bans on artificial intelligence by sending impromptu addendums to their customers and, in some cases, claiming that they’re unable to waive these bans because they intend to create their own AI tool.
Source: AI Is Reigniting Decades-Old Questions Over Digital Rights, but Fair Use Prevails | TechPolicy.Press
Rohan Sahai, who leads the Sora product team, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that there’s been considerable interest from the entertainment industry, without specifying the contours of the conversations. He sees utilization of the tools across most stages of production as the tools improve. “For some of these bigger production companies, the ones who are forward-looking, they see where things are going and try to think about how to change their whole workflows to make the best fit at this moment in time,” he says.
In recent weeks, Meta, Google, OpenAI and others have asked the Trump administration to block state A.I. laws and to declare that it is legal for them to use copyrighted material to train their A.I. models. They are also lobbying to use federal data to develop the technology, as well as for easier access to energy sources for their computing demands. And they have asked for tax breaks, grants and other incentives.
Source: Emboldened by Trump, A.I. Companies Lobby for Fewer Rules
Built for distribution, not attribution, today’s digital infrastructure fails to recognize authorship—let alone enforce it. That failure is now compounding. With AI models scraping everything from novels to music samples, intellectual property has become an open secret: valuable, vulnerable, and increasingly invisible. Story wants to change that. Not by issuing takedown notices or clamping down on remix culture—but by reprogramming IP itself.
Source: Reprogramming IP: Story Builds A Blockchain For The AI Era
As we move closer to an April 5 deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company, AI startup Perplexity has once again thrown its hat into the ring as a potential buyer. “All of society benefits when content feeds are liberated from the manipulations of foreign governments and globalist monopolists,” it says. Perplexity didn’t announce where the funding would come from for the acquisition.
Source: AI Startup Perplexity Wants to Buy TikTok, Open Source the ‘For You’ Feed
In a closely watched battle between music publishers and AI developer Anthropic, a California court has denied a request to halt the use of copyrighted song lyrics with its refusal to grant a preliminary injunction. The court ruled that the music publisher failed to demonstrate immediate and irreparable harm, while the scope of the requested restrictions was “ever-expanding.”
Source: Anthropic Scores Preliminary Victory in AI-Copyright Clash Against Music Companies * TorrentFreak
In a significant executive shuffle announced Monday, OpenAI is expanding COO Brad Lightcap’s responsibilities while CEO Sam Altman shifts his attention more toward the company’s technical direction. Lightcap will now “oversee day-to-day operations,” international expansion, and manage key partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft and Apple, according to Bloomberg.