If you’ve ever made an AI-generated pop-rock anthem for a darty with lyrics reminding guests it’s a BYOB potluck that starts at one, record labels aren’t amused. Convinced their IP was used to train the music bots, they’re now saying the scariest phrase in the business: “See you in court.”

Suno and fellow AI song generator startup Udio (of “BBL Drizzy” fame) were each sued yesterday by a group of copyright-holding giants, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group.

Legal diss track

The lawsuits, filed on the labels’ behalf by the powerful trade group the Recording Industry Association of America, accuse Udio and Suno of being “evasive” about the contents of their AI training datasets, allegedly to conceal that they are lifting songs from the labels’ catalogs to generate tracks that are eerily similar to the originals.

• The labels claim AI knockoffs could crowd the songs they’re based on out of the soundscape, leading to financial losses.
• They’re demanding damages of up to $150,000 per instance of copyright infringement, potentially adding up to billions of dollars.

In response, Suno said its algorithms are designed to produce “completely new outputs.” In court, the defendants are expected to retort that the “fair use” doctrine that allows copyrighted content to be used for things like parody, news reporting, or scholarship also applies to AI algorithm training.

Does Big Music hate AI?

This isn’t the first labels vs. AI lawsuit. Earlier this year, Universal Music and others sued AI company Anthropic, accusing its AI chatbot Claude 2 of spitting out barely changed lyrics by artists like Katy Perry and the Rolling Stones.

But the labels assure they’re not anti-AI luddites, stressing that they are open to collaboration through licensing deals to compensate them for the use of songs they own.

It’s not just the music biz…taking issue with copyrighted content feeding AI. The New York Times is taking OpenAI and Microsoft to court, while visual artists filed a class action suit against the developers of AI image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.—SK

After seeing their mother struggle with depression, two Forbes 30 Under 30 brothers founded Aura to reinvent the $100b mental wellness industry.

Their last investment round sold out quickly, so they’ve extended the opportunity to invest, with now only two days left. Why shares sold out so fast:

• Aura’s 8m+ users and 100k+ paying subscribers are just the beginning. The company is set for an international expansion by launching in six new languages.
• Their 3k+ investors include top Silicon Valley VCs and executives from Spotify, Meta, and Apple.
• The $100b mental wellness industry needs a library of wellness resources, and the rise of AI will help Aura meet demand even further.

There are only two days left, with very limited allocation remaining. Don’t miss out—invest in Aura today.

Julian Assange will go free after pleading guilty. The WikiLeaks founder, who’s been pursued by the US since publishing a trove of sensitive classified documents in the 2010s, has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony charge of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material. And if all goes to plan, Assange will be sentenced to the time he has already served in a British prison while fighting extradition to the US and allowed to return to his native Australia, ending a saga that’s created political headaches for the government. He’s scheduled to appear in a US federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands tomorrow morning to enter the plea and is then expected to hop a flight to Oz.

SCOTUS to review ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The Supreme Court will weigh in on the Biden administration’s challenge to the constitutionality of a Tennessee ban on doctors providing gender transition care, including hormone therapy and puberty blockers, to people under age 18. Agreeing to hear the case puts the court at the center of a hot-button political issue: Over 20 states have passed laws to curb gender transition care for minors since 2021, per the Washington Post. The high court will take up the case next term, which starts in October.

Shein considers the London look for its IPO. With its plans for a New York stock debut seeming to fall apart like a pair of $5 pants, Shein has reportedly filed confidential paperwork for an IPO in London. The China-founded fast-fashion behemoth faced pushback on its plans for a New York listing from US lawmakers, including concerns about possible forced labor in its supply chain. The potential move to London for what’s likely to be a major listing underscores the business difficulties for China-linked companies as geopolitical tensions with the US simmer—though Shein could still pull off a US listing.

Regulators across the pond yesterday charged the iPhone-maker with violating a broad new “online gatekeeper” law. This marks the first time the European Union’s fresh digital competition rules have bared their teeth at Big Tech.

The EU says…Apple has run afoul of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by anti-competitively making it difficult for developers to steer customers toward non-Apple App Store purchase methods, e.g., third-party websites or app stores that don’t take a hefty cut of digital sales like Apple. Regulators will also open an additional noncompliance investigation into other fees that Apple recently started charging EU developers.

Apple says…it’s “confident” that it’s complying with the new rules because it started allowing third-party app stores and downloads in the EU ahead of the enactment of the DMA in March. Separately, the company announced last week that due to regulatory caution, it won’t release the new iPhone’s signature AI feature in the EU.

The EU will keep investigating. Yesterday’s charges are regulators’ initial findings, but if they’re confirmed and Apple doesn’t adequately respond, the tech giant could be fined 10% of its global revenue. That IOU would trounce the $2 billion that the EU fined Apple in March for violating other anti-competition rules (Apple plans to appeal).

Release the Kraken. The EU has been dying to sic the DMA on Big Tech, the Financial Times reported. Regulators are still probing Meta’s and Alphabet’s compliance with the new law.—ML

There’s a new $5 meal deal on the block—but this one doesn’t involve a cutesy jingle or a footlong sandwich. McDonald’s rolls out its new value offering today, aiming to lure back cost-conscious customers who turned away from the chain amid increasing prices.

The deal includes four items—a McChicken or McDouble, four-piece nuggets, small fries, and a small drink—but will only be available for a month.

Why is Mickey D’s doing this? People aren’t flocking to the Golden Arches like they used to.

• McDonald’s missed sales expectations in Q1.
• It’s also battling a perception fueled by viral social media posts that the once-reliably affordable chain has gotten too expensive.

McDonald’s is hoping the $5 meal deal will bring back customers. Coca-Cola contributed $4.6 million to subsidize the promotion after some franchisees said it would eat into their profits.

Racing to the lowest price: McDonald’s may be the largest fast-food chain by sales volume, but it has competition tougher than a day-old fry. Last month, shortly after Bloomberg reported the chain’s intentions to bring out the deal, Burger King debuted its own $5 meal deal, Wendy’s dropped a $3 meal deal, and Starbucks jumped in with a $5 coffee and pastry combo.—CC

Your overly chipper coworker who always wishes you a happy hump day and insists Zoom meetings are better with cameras on might have a point (though not about the hump day thing). Research published in the Harvard Business Review that analyzed 40 million meetings from 11 organizations found that going camera-on correlated with sticking around at your job, finding that people who left their companies within a year enabled their cameras during meetings 18.4% of the time, compared to 32.5% of the time for employees who stayed at their company longer. While the researchers stressed that the relationship isn’t causal, they did say employers with lots of camera-shy workers might want to look into staff engagement issues.