By , February 19, 2021.

The Mechanical Licensing Collective Receives $424 Million in Historical Unmatched Royalties from Digital Service Providers — The royalties were accrued by DSPs prior to the MMA’s blanket license becoming available. The MLC now will undertake efforts to locate and identify the copyright owners entitled to those royalties and pay them. Songwriters and music publishers can sign up for free to make sure they are receiving all the royalties they are owed.

Cloudflare Must Block Pirate IPTV Services, Appeals Court Confirms — An Italian court upheld the injunctions, agreeing “that Cloudflare contributes to the infringements of its customer by optimizing and facilitating the site’s availability.”

AI Can Now Turn You Into a Fully Digital, Realistic Talking Clone — “In order to create the ‘AI Clone,’ Southern had to go into a studio and stand in front of a green screen so she could be captured from multiple angles. She also had to say several sets of words so that the program would be able to replicate her voice. In the video below, she describes the process as just reading a couple of scripts and singing a song. The entire process in front of the camera took just seven minutes. From there, hundreds of videos can be generated in a matter of minutes just by submitting text to the platform. A creator would not need to record any audio at all.”

Australia reruns Europe’s Big Tech copyright battle — Politico‘s Mark Scott reports, “This week, Australian lawmakers are finalizing new rules — known as the News Media Bargaining Code — that will require the two tech giants to pay local newspapers an as yet undefined sum whenever their material pops up on Google and Facebook’s digital platforms. On Tuesday, the Australian government said it would make minor tweaks to the legislation before it is submitted to the country’s parliament.”