AI, Copyright, and the Future of Music
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- Опубликовано: 2 июл 2024
- Join hosts Pete Salsich and Gary Pierson on The Screen Lawyer Podcast as they unpack the groundbreaking lawsuit shaking up the music industry. Discover how AI innovators like Suno and Udio are clashing with major music labels over copyright infringement, and what this pivotal battle means for the future of music and artists' rights.
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Great discussion. Thank you for bringing some sanity to this topic. Another point I never hear discussed is that the product these AI music generators produce would be absolute garbage and useless without the copywritten music they are taking (without permission or payment).
We need the case, but not for the sake of the labels. We just need a few more guidelines. The technology isn't going away. If you fully understand how that actually works, you will see that. I actually hope they lose. This is transformative for the future of music, not only for songwriters but also for artists, if they understand how to use it to their advantage.
Artists on Spotify get about 6% of song revenue, so it isn't just an issue of scale. Spotify and publishers take the money.
Suno charges $0.02 a song and grants you the rights. that is you pay $10 a month and you get 500 songs. You can use it for free but can only use songs for personal use.
From my non-lawyer perspective, I have to say that your discussion did little to convince me of the legal merits of the record companies' cases.
What I heard was an airing of a lot of the same grievances I hear from writers, artists, musicians, and film-makers--grievances that are a muddle of legal, moral, and fairness arguments, most of which are not really well considered.
For example, legally-speaking, before you even get to "fair use" considerations, doesn't there have to be an actual copy involved? But Suno and Udio are not designed to make copies of anything from their training sets. No copy; no copyright violation, right? End of story and we don't even get into "fair use" considerations.
And if by chance someone manages to force one of these AIs to create a song that is a little too close to an existing original (whether the original was in the training set or not), wouldn't it just be that one output, and those involved in making it, who would be subject to a copyright infringement case? We don't, for example, sue typewriter manufacturers or word-processing software companies because someone CAN use them to generate copyrighted works; we only sue the people who ACTUALLY use these (or other) tools to make unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.
I also think you guys spent a lot of time exploring a definition of "competition" that goes WAY beyond the legal intent of "competition" considerations in the context of a fair use claim. It just can't be true (can it???) that generating music that is not an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work is still "competing" in the marketplace by taking slots on streaming services that would otherwise go to human-created music. If that were the Copyright statute's definition of "compete" then we could only have one artist in each genre, right? Because everyone else would be "competing." But that's obviously nonsense. Copyright doesn't protect you from competition except in the single case where the competition is against an exact or near-exact copy of your work. That's not what Suno or Udio are generating.
It is particularly rich to hear this complaint about streaming services preferring to stream AI music because no one owns it or is owed royalties on it, as this is a direct consequence of the idiotic US Copyright Office stance that AI-generated art is not a work of human authorship and therefore cannot be copyrighted. (Imagine if they'd made this foolish claim about photography because a machine--the camera--makes the image. Think how damaging a ruling like that would be to the journalism, advertising, and film industries).
Most musicians who comment on these things that I've seen online seem to think this "no copyright for AI-generated materials" ruling protects them, when in fact it creates exactly the incentive you decry: to flood the streaming services with uncopyrighed royalty-free music, forcing musicians to compete with "free," which, as you pointed out, probably can't be done successfully.
Finally, with regard to AIs learning from existing songs, if I record an original song and post it to my public web page, you do not need my permission to study it. You can even take what you learn from studying my music and use that knowledge to create new music in "my" style. You can make money by selling your new song, even though you studied my song, used my style, and didn't pay me or get my permission. This is because copyright has no concept of "unauthorized studying." (I'm assuming here that your new song, like the vast majority of songs generated by Suno and Udio, is not an unlicensed cover of mine or so close a copy as to be a copyright violation).
I think the grievances of artists against AI are genuine, but most are actually complaints about capitalism and not sound legal arguments that withstand legal scrutiny. Not everything that feels unfair is illegal. Just ask factory workers who lost their jobs to robots when automation became commonplace. The world does not owe you a protected, competition-free place in the market.
Learning is not Stealing. The AI learned to make music by listening to music as a human musician does.
The trained model has no access to the music it was trained on, only what it has learned from those works.
The plaintiff in the Suno case are also the defendants as they were the ones attempting to create infringing work in violation of the terms of service and their own copywrite. They then published those works they claimed are infringing.
Suno doesn't let you ask for a song like an artist. They hacked it by saying rhymes with (rhyme for artists name), they entered the lyrics in violation of TOS, ext.. With suno you can name genres, and descriptive terms.
I think it is obvious that the record labels are attempting to learn how to make a competing product by gaining the methods used for training the AI in discovery.
Should cars be banned because horses can't compete? If a company makes better computer chip are they liable for making a better product?
Do people even listen to their own arguments and thing about them?
Here's what's stealing. Taking someone's hard work without permission or payment to make a profit. It's pretty simple.
@@timwells5776 If somebody looks at your car do you report it stolen because they have your car in their brain?
Your car is still in the driveway.
Music has no future. The last decent music died with Tom Petty. What’s left isn’t worth protecting.