Your commercial news round-up: UK business rate cuts, bus fare cap, Paramount and Warner Bros merger, Bloomsbury AI copyright settlement

Dimitar Dimitrov is a content and engagement coordinator at LawCareers.Net

Reading time: four minutes

Support for England’s high streets is set to increase, with pubs, clubs and live music venues due to receive a business rates cut and bus passengers benefitting from the return of a £2 fare cap. Elsewhere, European regulators have approved Paramount Skydance’s proposed takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, although the deal faces legal challenges in the US, while publisher Bloomsbury stands to receive a multimillion-pound payout from a major copyright settlement over the use of authors’ work to train AI systems. Read on for LawCareers.Net’s pick of this week’s top commercial stories.

• Pubs, clubs and live music venues in England are expected to receive a 20% reduction in their business rates bills from April under plans announced by new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham. The move is part of a £10 million package designed to support high streets and ease cost of living pressures. Burnham said the package will be fully funded, including through a review of business rates relief for businesses considered not to make a positive contribution to communities, such as vape shops. According to the government, the measure will benefit almost 32,000 pubs, with the average pub expected to save around £1,100 in the next financial year. The support will be targeted, with the largest live music venues excluded from the relief. Chair of UKHospitality Kate Nicholls welcomed the support but said restaurants, cafés and hotels are “the backbone of the high street” and should also be considered. Nicholls stated: “So if the PM truly wants to deliver a high street renaissance and growth in every postcode, then we need to look at a business rates cut for the whole of hospitality and tackle the broader cost of doing business.”
   
• Most bus fares on participating services in England outside London will be capped at £2 from January next year, Burnham has also announced, reversing the increase to a £3 cap introduced under the previous Labour government. The government said the policy, expected to cost more than £500 million, will help the cost of living by giving people “breathing space”. Burnham described affordable transport links as essential and said lower fares would “help people get to where they need to”. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said the measure would provide “a little bit of hope” for people facing higher living costs, particularly following fuel price increases linked to the US-Iran war.
   
• European regulators have approved Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion (£85 billion) takeover of Warner Bros Discovery, after Paramount agreed to end its European film distribution partnership with Universal Pictures within 13 months and refrain from launching a similar arrangement for 10 years. The European Commission’s decision has addressed concerns that a shared distribution venture with a rival could give the merged company excessive influence over cinema releases. Despite receiving EU clearance, the deal remains on hold in the US. A coalition of 12 US states filed a lawsuit last week seeking to block the merger, arguing it would cause “substantial harm to movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences”. Following the legal challenge, US Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín temporarily paused the takeover while the claims are considered. If the merger is not completed by 30 September, Paramount must pay Warner Bros shareholders a “ticking fee” of around $7 million per day until the deal closes.
  
  The Writers Guild of America has also opposed the takeover, with the organisation’s head Tom Fontata warning in a statement that the takeover would have "tremendous power to suppress our wages" and "eliminate opportunities for emerging writers".
   
• Bloomsbury, the publisher of Harry Potter, is set to receive a multimillion-pound payout as part of a $1.5 billion (£1.12 billion) copyright settlement between AI startup Anthropic and thousands of authors whose work was used to train AI systems. The publisher has 14,087 titles included in the agreement and is expected to receive compensation of about $3,000 per title. The payments to the publisher are expected to be made in instalments, potentially beginning in the second half of its current fiscal year, and the proceeds will be shared with authors whose works are covered by the settlement. After deductions, Bloomsbury and the affected authors are expected to receive approximately $19 million (£14 million). Copyright has emerged as a key issue in the age of AI, as tools such as Anthropic’s Claude chatbots are trained on large volumes of online data. This can include copyright-protected material such as novels and news articles, prompting disputes over the use of creative works in AI training.

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