Suno and Udio could face damages of up to $150,000 per song allegedly infringed.
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Music labels sue AI music generators for copyright infringement
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As someone who lived through the era of Napster, it's hard to fathom rooting for the record industry, but AI got me there. Good job, I guess?
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"But such a development would not preclude major labels from eventually developing their own AI music generators themselves, allowing only large corporations with deep pockets to control generative music tools for the foreseeable future."
Until the artists put their foot down like the screen writers and actors did. The large corps are going to have a day of reconning with artist over contract stipulations related to AI derivatives of the artists' work. At the end of the day, the large corporations may still win but there's a long road ahead before it's decided.
Until the artists put their foot down like the screen writers and actors did. The large corps are going to have a day of reconning with artist over contract stipulations related to AI derivatives of the artists' work. At the end of the day, the large corporations may still win but there's a long road ahead before it's decided.
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Do I actually agree with the music industry lawyers on something?
God, I feel so dirty. Time to go do tequila shots and boil myself in bleach.
God, I feel so dirty. Time to go do tequila shots and boil myself in bleach.
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The record companies are exploitative weasels, but so are the AI companies. In this case both sides are bad, but at least the record companies give a few pennies out of every dollar to the artists.
The AI companies will take the artists work, give them nothing, then flood the streaming services with cloned music that takes away what little the artists get now.
The AI companies will take the artists work, give them nothing, then flood the streaming services with cloned music that takes away what little the artists get now.
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There are already issues with the existing copyright system in the US for music. Pop music uses such simplistic chords that artists already often infringe one another naturally. Generative AI by it's very nature is a copy-cat machine. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and whether IP laws are ultimately changed - and if so then what way?
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This is no different than when the grifting gold rush was happening with blockchain and NFTs -- and thieving grifters were offering NFTs featuring copyrighted music and art (by the truckload, despite their claims of "exclusivity").
As the United States government is too busy hating each other, and gearing up for a second civil war, I predict the courts will waffle on this for years, the laws will continue to stay roughly a decade behind the times (which is how their captured industry shills like it), and the few legal rulings we see on the matter will mostly just be wins for giant law firms, and publishing houses. The artists will get squat. The only artist who has enough legal, political, and social power to take on the thieves, is Taylor -- and I predict the thieves will steer a fairly wide path around her.
Meanwhile, in the EU (in the land of functioning government), I am 100% comfortable predicting that the usual grifting suspects will float some trial balloons of this garbage there, be slapped down hard, and will then slink off to grift another day in countries without functional governments by and for the people.
LLM "AI" is just today's grift. Previously it was NFTs/blockchain/Web"3", prior to that it was: the Metaverse (keep dumping those billions chasing that, Zuck, one day you'll make people want to wear your goofy headsets), making everything "smart" Internet of Things (how's that going?), and the .COM rush.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The only part of this that really surprises me, is how gullible people continue to be. It is kind of astonishing
As the United States government is too busy hating each other, and gearing up for a second civil war, I predict the courts will waffle on this for years, the laws will continue to stay roughly a decade behind the times (which is how their captured industry shills like it), and the few legal rulings we see on the matter will mostly just be wins for giant law firms, and publishing houses. The artists will get squat. The only artist who has enough legal, political, and social power to take on the thieves, is Taylor -- and I predict the thieves will steer a fairly wide path around her.
Meanwhile, in the EU (in the land of functioning government), I am 100% comfortable predicting that the usual grifting suspects will float some trial balloons of this garbage there, be slapped down hard, and will then slink off to grift another day in countries without functional governments by and for the people.
LLM "AI" is just today's grift. Previously it was NFTs/blockchain/Web"3", prior to that it was: the Metaverse (keep dumping those billions chasing that, Zuck, one day you'll make people want to wear your goofy headsets), making everything "smart" Internet of Things (how's that going?), and the .COM rush.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The only part of this that really surprises me, is how gullible people continue to be. It is kind of astonishing
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Current copyright law doesn't grant protection from "using" copyrighted works, only for making copies of them and making derived works. What a "copy" is for a song has always been a crap shoot; I personally don't think "My Sweet Lord" is a copy of "He's So Fine" but the court disagreed.
I only bring this up because the RIAA has been trying to kill off fair use and first sale doctrine for a long time and they'd love a judgement that any "use" of a song would be subject to payment. So be careful what you wish for.
I only bring this up because the RIAA has been trying to kill off fair use and first sale doctrine for a long time and they'd love a judgement that any "use" of a song would be subject to payment. So be careful what you wish for.
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Human songwriters, composers, and musicians also train by learning existing (often copyrighted) music. Assuming the music was purchased legally, they are not infringing, unless they also produce music that is similar enough to be considered a derivative work (or a straight copy).
The same should be true for AIs. Training on (legally purchased) copyrighted works should not be a copyright violation. Copyright suits should only be entertained if the AI actually spits out something that's a copy, or at least highly derived from another work.
I don't trust current AIs enough to believe they don't or won't do that, but trying to limit training is a vast expansion of copyright, that will ultimately end up being used against human creators as well. Let the rights holders sue for AIs creating infringing works, not just because a computer "listened" to copyrighted works and then remembered some metadata about it.
The same should be true for AIs. Training on (legally purchased) copyrighted works should not be a copyright violation. Copyright suits should only be entertained if the AI actually spits out something that's a copy, or at least highly derived from another work.
I don't trust current AIs enough to believe they don't or won't do that, but trying to limit training is a vast expansion of copyright, that will ultimately end up being used against human creators as well. Let the rights holders sue for AIs creating infringing works, not just because a computer "listened" to copyrighted works and then remembered some metadata about it.
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Read this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.05284 -- this discusses "MusicGen", a model for generating music based on text descriptions or melodic features. MusicGen uses a transformer-based language model to generate music, trained on text or melody representations.
MusicGen does not copy songs verbatim but generates new music based on learned patterns and styles from the training data. It can mimic the style of existing music but does not replicate songs exactly, thus the generated music is not considered to be under the same copyright restrictions as the original songs. The model's outputs are new creations that are inspired by, rather than direct copies of, the training data.
So I guess the question will be how the courts decide music can be used. Can a human learn genres by listening? Can you train a model on genres by listening?
MusicGen does not copy songs verbatim but generates new music based on learned patterns and styles from the training data. It can mimic the style of existing music but does not replicate songs exactly, thus the generated music is not considered to be under the same copyright restrictions as the original songs. The model's outputs are new creations that are inspired by, rather than direct copies of, the training data.
So I guess the question will be how the courts decide music can be used. Can a human learn genres by listening? Can you train a model on genres by listening?
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This is like a Godzilla movie, two monsters who wreak havoc on the earth battle it out for dominance. And I feel like I’m supposed to root for one of them but I kinda wish theyd take each other out.
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Fair use really needs to be established better. Until then as Fenixgoon pointed out, the lawyers win.
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No, everyone will, as creative expression of all kinds will be excluded from the list of activities that is able to earn you a living. That will he outsourced to AI, so humans can concentrate better on the mindnumbing jobs that can't be automated yet.
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The AI companies will have trouble with this one.
First because there simply isn't as many recordings as written text and images (we know that to solve this they have cut the songs into small pieces). And that will make it that the generated content will match closer the data used to train it.
And second because the courts have decided in the past that songs that are just slightly similar or have an element lifted from another song (like a bass line) it's enough to declare it's infringing.
First because there simply isn't as many recordings as written text and images (we know that to solve this they have cut the songs into small pieces). And that will make it that the generated content will match closer the data used to train it.
And second because the courts have decided in the past that songs that are just slightly similar or have an element lifted from another song (like a bass line) it's enough to declare it's infringing.
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What about the scenario that a capable opensourced version starts to make the rounds? Even though no corporations would profit from ot, it could lead to a situation where everyone is able to generate their own personal playlist of music in the styles they love. That is something that sounds like a great desirable thing to some, but I really wonder how that would play out. Loss of a collective shared culture, loss of the concept of scarcity in a creative context, loss of ANY kind of curation.
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Well, so far it looks like that largest group of people to first benefit the most from AI are lawyers.
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Definitely on team They Both Suck
But that said, I think it's only ethical that if you profit off someone's content then you should pay for it. We'll see whether the law says training is copying but either way it's certainly use.
Will rightsholders license their content for training though? Some have but I could see the music industry giving AI companies the finger and setting themselves up as the model gatekeepers. That's probably worse than having lots of choices for legit (based on licensed content) models.
On the plus side these models are probably going to be created and distributed for free to run locally for the lulz anyway so the difference might only matter to people/corps that care about using legit models. It's already pretty easy to run a chatbot or image generator locally without worrying about what the models were trained on.
But that said, I think it's only ethical that if you profit off someone's content then you should pay for it. We'll see whether the law says training is copying but either way it's certainly use.
Will rightsholders license their content for training though? Some have but I could see the music industry giving AI companies the finger and setting themselves up as the model gatekeepers. That's probably worse than having lots of choices for legit (based on licensed content) models.
On the plus side these models are probably going to be created and distributed for free to run locally for the lulz anyway so the difference might only matter to people/corps that care about using legit models. It's already pretty easy to run a chatbot or image generator locally without worrying about what the models were trained on.
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The problem is fair use never considered the kind of mass-use that AI training requires. It's simply an area that existing laws don't really address. I'm not surprised that there's a push to use existing laws to try and cover AI, but until we start getting legal decisions, it's all just throwing mud and hoping something sticks.
Congress could step in with some actual laws, but Congress is Congress and the chance of Congress Congressing in the foreseeable future over this issue is effectively zero.
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I fully agree. I do however wonder what the license would allow AI companies to do. I don’t think “use” is a description that works for anyone.
Would they allow AI’s te be trained on the music? And what if that AI generates an almost verbatim copy of an existing work? Who would own that?
So it’s not only the question of whether they would license - for enough money they would - but what that license will allow.
Something tells me that the wording of the license will be such that rightsholders don’t need to pay the artists under contract though.
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This conclusion completely ignores the elephant in the room. Licenses would mean creators would get paid. A pittance perhaps, but still, they would be paid.
If your product depends on stolen intellectual property, then your product is unethical.
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See, that's easy. A verbatim copy is a copy, and thus a copyright violation. What's hard is when the output is not a verbatim copy. There's also the argument that the dataset itself is a copy, but there's previous case law about Google that it's not, or at least is fair use.
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Here's the thing, Musicians who release their music publicly consented to other humans doing this, they did not consent to machines doing this. Your ability to understand the difference that musicians do actually see is irrelevant to the reality that they see it as different and they did not consent to this difference.
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Starting with the usual IANAL, I think the comparison with Google has to be done with extreme care. Yes, Google "copied" at a scale similar to the AI companies, but you couldn't use what Google did to generate something new. Which is what AI does.
Now you could say that "well, humans learn by reading/copying" and you would be right. But a human can't produce at the scale or breadth of an AI. It's a rare person that could sing like Mike Jagger, Harry Bellefonte, Eartha Kitt, and Enrico Caruso at the same time. Which is what AI does.
That's why I think we're just in uncharted waters here.
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I'm starting to develop something of a growing aversion against techheads who insist on treating machine learning processes the same as fellow human beings. It's thrown around so casually, and with such arrogant confidence and a patina of unassailable logic. But this is not about some law of nature or mathematics, or inevitable chain of events that we have to understand or accept. This is more akin to going against the robber barons by calling forunions etc. Recognizing that we're badly in need of constructing defensive walls against developments that are going to set back the human condition for huge swats of people. Maybe OTHER people right now,, but this is just the start.
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I believe the flaw in your ointment is equating human-derived works and AI-derived works.
A human has the ability to create original works based on what came before. An AI can only create derivative works, because it only knows what came before.
There's some cross-over between the human and the AI because humans can create derivative works quite easily, of course. But that doesn't mean AI's can create original works, too. Regardless of what it is, an AI will always have elements of what came before. A human can come up with new things the AI can't do.
I also tend to give humans more credit because of the effort they put into their creations. Call it "soul" if you will. AI-derived works are soulless imitations.
Objectively, one might argue there's no difference. And that's the problem.
Human art and endeavors are not soulless. An AI will never feel the consequences of their creation. As a kind of artist, and certainly someone with a lot of experience making things, that makes a huge difference in my respect for what people do, versus my complete disdain for what an AI does.
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This!
We need to separate "training" from "content production". If the courts decide that it is illegal to use copyrighted works to "train" AI, why would it not then be a copyright violation to use a copyrighted work to "train" (or teach) a human? Training is simply gleaning information from a pre-existing work. Information/knowledge is never protected by copyright.
Copyright comes into the equation when you ask an AI (or a person) to reproduce something (or make a derivative work of something). If I ask an AI to create a song that sounds just like "Stairway to Heaven" and it does, I'm probably going to be in hot water with Led Zeppelin -- but the outcome would (should) be the same if I asked a person to do the same thing.
There also exists the tort of misappropriation, which could apply here (I'm taking the fruits of your labors without permission), but it doesn't have the same eye-popping statutory damages provisions that copyright has.
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I think we are essentially saying the same thing: it is the output that could be problematic. But that is separate from the training of the model. Copyright law is already stretched enough and shouldn't be deformed significantly to cover training. If the record labels can show infringing output that should be the basis of the suit, not the training element.
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Humor me here; What makes this any different from me listening to the radio for my entire life, and writing a rock song that would no doubt be inspired by all of the songs I've listened to over the years regardless of whether or not it was intentional?
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Even leaving aside the question of whether AI is essentially doing that, it's a delicious irony that these music rights companies are profiting from people who have done exactly this.
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