HYBE's Mystery Move and J&J's Copyright Woes: MBW's Weekly Scoop

Welcome to Music Business Worldwide's weekly round-up, where we bring you the top five stories that made headlines over the past week.

This week, the music business news cycle was dominated by litigation news. Music publishers suing AI firm Anthropic for allegedly copying lyrics without authorization responded to Anthropic's motion to dismiss, saying the AI firm just wants to stall the case as much as possible.

Meanwhile, pharma giant Johnson & Johnson has been sued by Associated Production Music, which claims a catalog of 1 million tracks and is co-owned by Sony and Universal's publishing arms, for rampant copyright infringement in its social media promo videos.

In other courtroom news, US performance rights org BMI has filed a petition in a New York court to determine the license fees to be paid by SiriusXM, the culmination of a long-running disagreement over the appropriate payments to be made by the satellite radio giant.

There was also news this week on the M&A front, with MBW uncovering a USD $25-million purchase of a 51% stake in an unknown company by K-pop giant HYBE.

Meanwhile, Concord Music Group's recordings division announced the merger of Concord Records and Fantasy Records under the Concord Records brand, with the entity to be run by Co-Presidents Margi Cheske and Mark Williams.

Here's what happened this week...

The music publishers who sued AI developer Anthropic last year for allegedly infringing the copyrights on song lyrics have asked a US federal court to reject Anthropic's request to dismiss much of the case against it.

Anthropic's defense of this case so far has been to stall as much as possible, mischaracterize the facts alleged in publishers' complaint... and misstate the law, lawyers for Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO wrote in a response to Anthropic's motion to dismiss.

Anthropic last month filed a motion with the US District Court for the Northern District of California to have a large part of the copyright infringement case against it dismissed, which, if granted, would eliminate three of the four charges brought against it.

Anthropic