Busy Time for Gen AI Content Licensing Barely Clarifies Its Hazy Future
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As astonishingly rapid as the evolution of generative AI is, the legal and licensing frameworks building around it have struggled mightily to catch up to the pace with which the technology advances.
Which made the month of June all the more interesting considering the flood of relevant developments shaping a marketplace that by even the most optimistic estimates will take years to come together. To wit:
- Two rulings made by federal courts last week illuminate how the murky concept of fair use applies to book publishers suing Anthropic and Meta for copyright infringement
- Hollywood fired its first long-awaited shot toward an AI firm, Midjourney, in the form of a lawsuit from Disney and NBCUniversal
- Major music labels have reportedly begun negotiations to strike licensing deals with AI startups Suno and Udio
And yet while this might seem significant in laying down ground rules for the licensing of all forms of content for the purpose of gen AI training, a panel discussion I moderated last week at the UCLA Entertainment Law symposium, featuring execs on the frontlines, made clear that these developments don’t quite add up to much of a leap forward into a future that remains hazy.
The implications of the Anthropic and Meta rulings have kicked up much debate about how influential they will end up being in the long run considering they are just two of a larger pool of a varied mix of lawsuits that have roiled this nascent industry over the last year. (VIP+ subscribers can access a full updated listing of these lawsuits.)
“With around 40 lawsuits surrounding AI training, we’re not yet at any kind of consensus,” said panelist Seth Goldstein, general counsel & VP of business & legal affairs at Music AI. “It’s going to be an interesting couple of years to see where all this goes given what’s going on in different district (courts) and different circuits.”
While the panel was careful to parse the nuanced differences between text, audio and video media categories, each having its own distinct demands as they pertain to licensing, the conversation was dominated by news publishers, who are a prolific source of the lawsuits targeting the AI firms alleged to have scraped their content.
What seems to be at play here is that the lawsuits really are just leverage brought to the negotiations by the publishing companies, which could just as easily settle their legal differences if an equitable licensing deal was placed in front of them.
But playing to a room populated by entertainment-industry lawyers, video had to be a core concern. A Luminate survey conducted in May found just how common replicating art styles with gen AI is: 37% of U.S. generative AI users have intentionally prompted or used gen AI to create an image in the style of a specific artist or author.
The Disney/NBC Universal lawsuit represented a first shot across the bow from Hollywood toward the AI crowd, perhaps strategically fired at a relative minnow such as Midjourney compared with the bigger whales in the space like OpenAI.
Yes, the lawsuit arrived just days before Midjourney announced an expansion from still images to video for its Gen AI capabilities, bringing with it the prospect of accelerating the very IP appropriation the suing media companies are alleging is rife on that platform.
But perhaps the real indicator that Hollywood has truly gone on the attack against its AI overlords would be a lawsuit aimed at the bigger players its publishing counterparts seem less shy about provoking.
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