National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) head David Israelite just recently emphasized the stat, “one of the craziest” he’s seen, in a LinkedIn post. By now, many are aware of Spotify’s audiobook-bundling embrace, which is fueling significant royalty effects in the music world. And to put it mildly, the situation isn’t sitting right with songwriters and publishers.
Source: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Made More From Stock Sales Last Year Than All US-Based Songwriters Combined
UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has reiterated the government’s stance on AI copyright policy, urging critics not to “resist change” as discussions continue. The proposal, which would require creators to actively opt out if they do not want their work included in AI training datasets, has drawn criticism from musicians, filmmakers, and media organisations.
Source: UK Technology Secretary defends AI copyright plans amid industry backlash
Cloudflare, a global network service that helps some of the biggest websites in the world deliver content to users, has devised a new plan to deal with AI companies’ web scrapers. And the idea is as positively devious as it is ingenious. Basically, bots that don’t follow the rules laid out for them via protocols such as robots.txt, a simple text file that lays out what web crawlers are allowed to do on a site, will be messed with in order to waste the time and resources of the company in charge of the bot.
Source: One company’s devious plan to stop AI web scrapers from stealing your content
Can internet service providers be held liable for pirating subscribers? Internet provider Grande Communications asked the Supreme Court to review this key question. With no clear standards for handling copyright infringement notices, internet service providers are caught between a rock and a hard place, Grande argues. In its petition, the ISP highlights the need to resolve the “scattershot” approach to ISP liability, seeking a more defined and workable solution.
Source: Supreme Court Asked to Resolve ISP’s Copyright Piracy Conundrum * TorrentFreak
The Independent is to launch a news service which it said will use Google AI tools to summarise its journalism for “time-poor audiences”. The publisher says all content written for the service, named Bulletin, will be “reviewed and checked” by journalists before publication and seven people have been hired to staff it. The service will use Google‘s Gemini AI model to re-write the Independent’s own articles, the publisher said, alongside its own “in-house data and development teams”.
Source: Independent launching AI-powered news service for ‘time-poor audiences’
More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies. “We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the letter says in part.
The Songwriters Guild of America (SGA), the Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL), and Music Creators North America (MCNA) have released a joint statement addressing request for comments on the proposed AI Action Plan by the Trump administration. Together, they propose a legislative solution that would include establishing sui generis rights for music creators to control the use of their works on generative AI platforms.
Source: Is a Blanket Music Licensing System Ahead for GenAI?
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler’s AI system “DABUS” was not entitled to copyright protection, and that only works with human authors can be copyrighted.
Source: US Appeals Court Rejects Copyrights for AI-Generated Art Lacking ‘Human’ Creator
More than 30 performing arts leaders in the UK, including the bosses of the National Theatre, Opera North and the Royal Albert Hall, have joined the chorus of creative industry concern about the government’s plans to let artificial intelligence companies use artists’ work without permission. They also urged the government to support the “moral and economic rights” of the creative community in music, dance, drama and opera.
Source: Performing arts leaders issue copyright warning over UK government’s AI plans
On London Book Fair’s opening day, Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said the AAP would be filing its response imminently in response to the Trump administration’s call for public input. And in the same session, Dan Conway, CEO of the UK’s Publishers Association, told us that there’s no result known as yet from the consultation period, nor a sense for how long an outcome may be in coming.
Source: AI: Publishers Warn White House of ‘a Bloated Fair-Use Defense’ and an ‘Unworkable Opt-Out Regime’