RightsTech E-News: November 4, 2026

RightsTechNov 4, 2026

November 04, 2026

Featured Story

The Politics of AI

In the nearly three years since the New York Times filed its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, AI models’ use of journalistic content has evolved significantly, raising the stakes considerably for both parties and their respective industries in the outcome of the case. A victory by either side would be a devastating blow to the other. Read More(Source: RightsTech Extra)

Today's Stories

NYT demands Brave shut down its paywall blocker and end deals with AI firms

The New York Times and other newspaper companies sued Brave Software yesterday, alleging that the browser maker illegally bypasses paywalls and sells stolen news content to AI companies. “Brave is the supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere,” the NYT alleged in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Read More(Source: ars Technica)

Music Artists Coalition, Hollywood Consortium File Amicus Brief Supporting NY Times

Cate Blanchett’s nonprofit The Human Consent Foundation (HCF) has filed an amicus brief in the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alongside a coalition of artist advocacy groups. The 31-page brief, filed in the Southern District of New York on Friday, argues that the tech companies’ position that it was impossible to effectively clear the rights for its use of such content runs counter to the active and proven infrastructure designed for that very purpose. Read More(Source: Digital Music News)

Spotify plans Q1 2027 launch for AI covers and remixes tool

Spotify plans to launch its AI-powered covers and remixes tool in the first quarter of 2027. That’s according to the Financial Times, which reported the timeline on Friday (October 30), citing people familiar with the plans. The company is weighing a price of $4 to $5 per month for the tool, on top of existing subscription fees, one of those people told the FT. The product could be unveiled around the Grammy Awards in February, according to the report. Read More(Source: Music Business Worldwide)

Suno’s new MCP tool lets users make songs inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini

The tool, Suno MCP, is in beta and was announced in Suno’s release notes on Wednesday (October 28). Suno wrote in the MCP release notes: “Connect Suno to Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code and other MCP clients, then create music in the workspace you’re already in, no tab-switching needed.” Suno’s MCP page also lists Gemini and the coding tool Cursor among the apps it supports. Read More(Source: Music Business Worldwide)

Is Spotify’s Anti-Spam Crackdown Catching Legitimate Music in the Crossfire?

Spotify’s efforts to combat AI-driven content have been confronted with a new challenge: the potential for legitimate recordings by real artists to suffer unintended consequences. That’s an issue raised by 11A founder Austin Staubus. Staubus recently sat down for an interview with YouTuber and music marketer Andrew Southworth and discussed what he described as troubling changes to Spotify’s search and discovery systems. Read More(Source: Digital Music News)

More AI Detector False Positives Emerge In Rapid Succession

The music industry has another big problem in the age of artificial intelligence: AI detectors. Tools designed to catch AI-generated “slop” before it reaches digital streaming platforms, or at least properly identifying it when it does, have had the unintended consequence of rampant false positives. The issue has particularly affected songs that incorporate darkwave, electro, and post-punk, which were all prominent genres in the ’80s when the synthesizer was at its peak. Read More (Source: Digital Music News)

UMG talks AI music: ‘The volume is growing faster than the safeguards’

Universal Music Group’s quarterly financial earnings-call saw boss Sir Lucian Grainge sounding the latest alarm around AI music. He cited Deezer’s latest figures showing more than 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks are being uploaded to streaming services every day. “The volume is growing faster than the safeguards,” warned Grainge, despite listing various measures that UMG and its DSP partners have taken to deal with the slop-torrent. Read More(Source: Music Ally)

New standard could make it easier for publishers to opt out of AI training

This new, work-in-progress control will give websites and publishers a new way to communicate their AI training preferences across multiple AI providers. This lets them invoke their preferences in a single step in robots.txt, instead of listing each one individually. Instead of managing separate instructions for every AI developer, website owners will be able to use a shared ‘policy token’ within robots.txt to set broad preferences across participating AI providers. Read More (Source: Search Engine Roundtable)

Free AI-scraping detection service to help publishers sign or sue

Content licensing organisation NLA Media Access has launched a free service to help publishers identify organisations scraping their content and pursue either commercial licensing deals or legal action. The Collective Intelligence Advisory Service analyses website data from participating publishers to identify activity that may indicate content is being scraped without permission. Read More (Source: PressGazette)

Google may buy publishers time – they should use it to loosen tech giant’s grip

People remain far more likely to click on at least one news link from Google’s AI Mode experience than they are from ChatGPT, according to a new study. A new report from DJB Strategies, From Search Risk to Agentic Risk, looks at how the disruption from AI to journalism businesses will play out over the next three years. Central to this is the contest between two distinct models of search. Read More (Source: PressGazette)

Meta ‘holding publishers over a barrel’, says News Media Association chief

The News Media Association (NMA) has called on the UK Government to back the Competition and Markets Authority in regulating Meta following the announcement of its new AI scraping terms. Publishers are “shocked and disgusted” by Meta’s proposed terms, NMA chief executive Theo Bamber told Press Gazette, adding the platform is “holding news publishers over a barrel” by demanding access to content to train its AI products. Read More (Source: PressGazette)

AI content retrieval ‘already eating away’ at publisher businesses, court told

Unique visitors to leading US online publishers fell by a quarter between 2023 and 2025, according to new data shared by trade body Digital Content Next. DCN shared the survey data from its members in a document filed on Thursday in support of The New York Times and other news publishers including The New York Daily News and Ziff Davis in their ongoing copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft. Read More (Source: PressGazette)

Wikimedia Foundation Tries to Save Itself by Brokering AI Copyright Deal

The Wikimedia Foundation submitted an amicus brief on Thursday to the court overseeing the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. “Fair use should not be interpreted in a manner that would gatekeep all uses of copied works under proprietary terms to the detriment of efficient innovation,” Wikimedia’s legal team wrote in the amicus brief. “Neither should fair-use doctrine serve as a green light to snub licensing terms and fragment the flow of knowledge between human authors and audiences.” Read More (Source: Gizmodo)

What Training Dataset Transparency Mandates Hide

It is important to understand that uncovering the contents of training datasets alone is insufficient to enable meaningful accountability. Knowing what is included in a training dataset provides little insight into why it was included—let alone how it can be contested. And the rationales behind data practices ultimately shape whose data is included, whose interests are protected, and who bears the burden of dataset-related harms. Read More (Source: Tech Policy)

Shareholder sues Sundar Pichai,12 others over training Google’s AI on copyrighted works

An Alphabet shareholder has sued Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and 10 other directors and executives at Google‘s parent company over how Google trained its AI models. The lawsuit claims they adopted “an unlawful business strategy” of building Google’s AI on copyrighted works and people’s voices – including recordings, compositions, and lyrics allegedly used to train the Lyria music models. Read More (Source: Music Business Worldwide)

GEMA Hooks Canada’s SOCAN Into Its Growing One Arena Live Collective

One Arena has announced its newest member, the Canadian collective SOCAN, providing a commitment to the initiative that expands the One Arena network beyond Europe. The move promises to bring greater transparency for songwriters, artists, and rightsholders whose music is performed on stages around the world. The One Arena network gives rightsholders a clearer view of what they can expect to earn from their international live performances. Read More (Source: Digital Music News)

Google faces copyright challenge in Europe over Gemini’s use of news content

Google has faced a legal challenge in Europe over how its Gemini chatbot uses news publishers’ content, after an adviser to the European Union’s top court said the practice could breach copyright rules under certain circumstances. The opinion could strengthen publishers’ efforts to seek compensation from technology companies for using their journalism in AI-generated responses. According to Reuters, the case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) involves Hungarian website operator Like Company and Google. Read More (Source: Storyboard 18)

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RightsTech Newsletter is a Digital Media Wire, Inc. publication and is published in association with Concurrent Media Strategies, LLC.

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