"Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.
Row K Entertainment was conceived as a niche solution to a specific problem: too many indie movies, not enough indie buyers. Launched in August 2025, the fledgling label entered the movie market with a clear pitch.
TikTok will soon let you stream full songs in its app via a new integration with Apple Music. The company's new Play Full Song feature makes it possible to link your Apple Music account to TikTok, and play any song that strikes your fancy directly in the app while you're scrolling. Starting a song is as simple as tapping a button in the Sound Details page or your For You page.
In a February 2 notification sent to relevant customers, the cloud giant says it is updating its Service Terms to specify it does not have "defense or payment obligations for third-party patent claims against you related to use of these services for audio/video encoding, decoding, or transcoding." The services in question are AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaConvert, Amazon Interactive Video Service, Chime SDK, Amazon GameLift Streams, and Amazon Kinesis Video Services.
In recent years, multimedia content has firmly established itself online, fueled by the development of high-speed Internet technologies as well as the growing availability of tools for creating and editing video. The global lockdowns also contributed to this process by forcing people to look for similar alternatives on the web. If integrating video into your communications sounds like an overwhelming investment, start leveraging your products with music and audio that are often underestimated by marketers.
Of the $43.9 billion that advertisers in the U.S. are expected to spend on creator marketing in 2026, most of that money - 55% - will go towards ads amplifying the creators' content, not to the actual creation and posting of content by the creators themselves. And that spend is only increasing as creator content becomes a more popular choice for ad creative and paid amplification provides brands with the analytics to be able to more effectively gauge the impact of creators' content.
As 2025 fades into the rearview mirror, many of the entertainment and media industry's biggest legal questions remain unresolved. In this episode of The Briefing, Weintraub Tobin partners Scott Hervey and Tara Sattler take a forward-looking approach to the cases and doctrines that could shape 2026. In this episode, they cover: The unsettled future of fair use in AI training and copyright infringement How courts are approaching lawful versus unlawful acquisition of training data The growing split in AI cases involving market substitution and fair use
Free YouTube Music accounts are now seeing their access to lyrics limited, according to multiple reports. Google started testing lyrics as an exclusive feature for Premium users in September, but it appears that it's now receiving a wider rollout. It seems that free users will be limited to viewing lyrics for five songs per month, though we've reached out to Google for confirmation.
In an audacious action starting to attract media attention, last month a group of piracy actors called Anna's Archive copied about 86 million music files from Spotify. The intention was to release the hoard on the BitTorrent file-sharing platform. All three of the major labels (UMG, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group), along with Spotify, launched the unsurprising lawsuit in September. The presiding judge, Jed . Rakoff, issued an injunction (HERE).
But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music's streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don't guess where culture is going, you know.
Musicboard, an app for music discovery and recommendations, has been struggling, according to its users. Over the past several months, users said the app experienced outages, the website went offline, and the Android app disappeared from the Play Store. This has concerned its devoted, if small, user base. (The app has been downloaded around 462,000 times to date, according to market intelligence provider Appfigures.) On Reddit, users have been recommending alternatives and offering each other support as they wait for any update.