Spotify is facing serious turmoil in Turkey, including allegations of bribery around playlist placement and mounting regulatory pressure. The controversy escalated after several Turkish artists raised complaints, questioning how playlists were created and alleging that unfair visibility was being granted to certain performers in exchange for bribes.
Source: Spotify Investigating Playlist Bribery Allegations in Turkey
Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed SoundExchange‘s $150 million lawsuit against SiriusXM, ruling that Congress has never granted the PRO the authority to file lawsuits on behalf of recording artists and record labels. In response, SoundExchange said in a statement, “SoundExchange firmly believes Judge Buchwald’s interpretation is entirely wrong on the law.”
Source: SoundExchange slams judge’s ruling in SiriusXM case as ‘entirely wrong on the law’
Major academic publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, are trying to unmask the operators of several shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library and Libgen. They’re also targeting SLUM, a third-party uptime monitor for these unofficial libraries. A DMCA subpoena, issued by a D.C. federal court, requires Cloudflare to hand over identifying user data for possible legal action.
Source: Publishing Giants Escalate War on ‘Shadow Libraries’ With Broad Cloudflare Subpoena * TorrentFreak
A powerhouse team has launched a new initiative called ‘Doing AI Differently,’ which calls for a human-centred approach to future development. For years, we’ve treated AI’s outputs like they’re the results of a giant math problem. But the researchers – from The Alan Turing Institute, the University of Edinburgh, AHRC-UKRI, and the Lloyd’s Register Foundation – behind this project say that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Source: Alan Turing Institute: Humanities are key to the future of AI
From AI‑generated product shots slipping into online catalogs, to manipulated photos influencing legal disputes, the trustworthiness of visual content has never been more in question. In an environment where seeing is no longer believing, brands, media organizations, and cultural institutions can no longer afford to ignore the issue of content authenticity.
Source: Introducing the Authenticity & Content Provenance Maturity Model – Kaptur
Universal Pictures is taking a new approach to combat mass theft of its movies to teach artificial intelligence systems. Starting in June with How to Train Your Dragon, the studio has attached a legal warning at the end credits of its films stating that their titles “may not be used to train AI.” It’s also appeared on Jurassic World Rebirth and Bad Guys 2.
Source: Universal Pictures to Big Tech: We’ll Sue If You Steal Our Movies For AI
Midjourney responded to a lawsuit from Disney and Universal, arguing that the studios cannot stop AI training and cannot ‘have it both ways’ on AI. “Copyright law does not confer absolute control over the use of copyrighted works,” Midjourney’s lawyers argued. “The limited monopoly granted by copyright must give way to fair use, which safeguards countervailing public interests in the free flow of ideas and information.”
Source: Midjourney Says Disney Cannot Prevent AI Training and Wants to ‘Have It Both Ways’
Perplexity published a response to Cloudflare’s claims that it disrespects robots.txt and engages in stealth crawling. Perplexity argues that Cloudflare is mischaracterizing AI Assistants as web crawlers, saying that they should not be subject to the same restrictions since they are user-initiated assistants. According to Perplexity, its system does not store or index content ahead of time. Instead, it fetches webpages only in response to specific user questions.
Source: Perplexity Says Cloudflare Is Blocking Legitimate AI Assistants
The commission, in its interim report into “harnessing data and the digital economy”, used copyright as a case study for how Australia’s existing regulatory framework could be adapted to manage the risks of artificial intelligence. A key recommendation was that the federal government should conduct a sweeping review of regulations to plug potential gaps that could be exploited by “bad actors” using AI.
The opt-in agreement between Kobalt and $3.3 billion-valued Eleven Labs establishes what sources describe as “parity” between publishing and recorded music revenues. Each side will receive an approximate 50/50 split of royalties generated from the AI platform. Eleven Music’s basic tier is trained on production music, but a forthcoming ‘Eleven Music Pro’ offering will soon be trained on cleared catalog from Kobalt and Merlin.