AI and copyright: ICMP warns of the « biggest theft in history »!

Posted by Isabelle Szczepanski le 12 septembre 2025

The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) warns of the massive and illegal capture of musical works to train artificial intelligences, calling the practice « the greatest theft of intellectual property in history », and calls for regulations that respect copyright.

For the past two years, the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), an organization representing 90% of the world’s music publishing industry, has been quietly campaigning with European institutions and national governments. Its aim: to alert them to what its managing director, John Phelan, now describes as « the greatest theft of intellectual property in history », namely the massive and often illegal capture of protected works to train generative artificial intelligences. « The Internet is being sucked in every day, » sums up John Phelan. Behind this formula, a practice: « scraping », which consists of collecting huge volumes of data without…

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