Universal Music Group has signed an exclusive, long-term global partnership with Apple Corps Ltd. covering merchandise, licensing, and e-commerce for The Beatles. The agreement was announced on Wednesday (August 19). It hands UMG worldwide physical and digital merchandise rights for the band and builds on Universal’s existing stewardship of The Beatles’ recorded music catalog.
Source: UMG strikes global deal for The Beatles’ merch, licensing, and e-commerce
When an artificial intelligence image generator produces a portrait, whose work went into it? The question sits at the center of lawsuits, licensing deals, and proposed regulations worldwide. Artists want credit. Companies want clarity. Policymakers want a way to assign responsibility. New work from a team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) suggests that for models trained on large datasets, the question may often have no answer.
Source: Study finds generated images often can’t be traced to training data
Each suit attaches an exhibit of 500 compositions, described as “a prioritized representative bellwether”. Round Hill says it plans to amend both cases to cover “potentially ten thousand or more” works. The suits claim direct infringement under the Copyright Act, plus circumvention of access controls and removal of copyright management information under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Source: Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for up to $1B apiece.
On Monday, 404 Media revealed that it had connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book.
Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI
Anthropic has begun embedding an imperceptible watermark in all text its newest Claude models generate. The change took effect for models launched in the EU on August 2, 2026, and Anthropic says it will apply worldwide. Anthropic laid out the plan in a support article after signing the EU AI Act’s Code of Practice on transparency. In other words, it’s not exactly volunteering to do this.
Source: Anthropic Is Watermarking Every Claude AI Output. Builders Are Already Trying to Break It
Spotify, a music streamer, said it removed 75 million bulk uploads, duplicate songs and other “spammy” tracks last year — a sizable chunk of its total portfolio. LinkedIn said in July that “A.I. slop is a top priority for all of us” and developed a button for users to report it. Researchers from YouTube’s parent company, Google, described how a video service wiped 130,000 channels of low-quality content off its platform over six months.
Content creators on Twitch are raging at the Amazon-owned streaming platform, which the company says will train its AI on Twitch streamers’ content by default, unless they opt out. It’s a stance that many major companies seem to be taking to ensure they can freely train their AI models from the platforms they own. “Why is it not opt-in? That’s what everybody is spamming in chat,” said Twitch’s Chief Product Officer Mike Minton during a livestream. Well, there’s an honest answer: If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in.
Source: Amazon Exec Openly Admits That Voluntary AI Opt-Ins Don’t Work: ‘Nobody Would Opt In’
Technically signed into law in June, the Colorado Artist Company Act took effect this past Wednesday, August 12th. Spanning nearly 30 pages, the bill aims to allow artists – referring here to those who create across music, painting, photography, film, writing, “digital content,” and different areas yet – to establish the aforementioned artist companies (or “A-Companies”). According to the law, the term describes an “ALLC” with “a stated artistic mission set forth in its articles of organization or operating agreement.”
Source: What’s an ‘A-Company’? The ‘Colorado Artist Company Act’ Goes Into Effect
Shortly after scoring a multimillion-dollar book deal for a debut author, the novelist’s agents pulled the plug. They couldn’t verify that the book had been wholly written by their client. The spectacular implosions of big book deals over suspected AI use—and fears about who might be next—are forcing a reckoning over the nature of authorship, the relationship between writers and publishers and the industry’s long-term survival. But nobody can seem to agree who exactly is responsible for solving this problem, or even how much a problem it actually is.
Source: AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos
Suno, the AI music generator that’s managed to both rankle the music industry and lure some of its biggest talent to its side, has added music company BMG as its latest licensing partner as it prepares new models powered by licensed work. The partnership will see Suno pay for BMG’s repertoire of recordings from its artists, while also covering the use of any BMG songs to train Suno’s past models.
Source: AI Music Generator Suno Strikes Licensing Deal With BMG