Top Noteworthy Copyright Stories from June 2025 — June was a busy month for copyright. The Copyright Alliance’s Rachel Kim reviews some of the key developments that took place.
UMG Chief Digital Officer on AI Music: ‘If You Don’t Claim a Seat at the Dinner Table, You Might Wind Up on the Menu’ — “Also during his talk, Nash stressed the position that ‘copyright is not the enemy of innovation’ and that ‘market-based solutions are the answer’ to the challenges AI poses to intellectual property-based industries like music.”
EU’s AI code of practice for companies to focus on copyright, safety — “The code is part of the AI rule book, which will come into effect in a staggered manner and will apply to Google owner Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and other companies. Signatories to the code will have to draw up and make publicly available summaries about the content used to train their general-purpose AI models, only employ copyright-protected content when using web crawlers as well as mitigate the risk of copyright-infringing output.”
Pirate IPTV Trio Sentenced to 14 Years Prison For Money Laundering — “A court in Brazil has handed down prison sentences totaling 14 years to three individuals for money laundering offenses linked to a pirate IPTV service. A software developer who made the service available through a popular IPTV app, his sister, and a mutual friend handled thousands of transactions through bank accounts, with funds laundered through a small hosting company.”
Use of Floorplans in Real Estate Listings is Permissible Under U.S. Copyright Law — “Initially, the district court ruled that the floorplan drawings fell within an exception of the Copyright Act that exempts pictures, paintings, photographs or other pictorial representations of an architectural work if it is visible from a public place. The appeals court rejected that theory and remanded the case for further development, observing that a fair use defense might apply. The case found its way back to the Eighth Circuit after the district court granted summary judgment on the basis of the defendants’ fair use.”