Only if you're a *rich* IP owner. I own the rights to about a dozen books I've written and published, but I've got no recourse against AI stealing and regurgitating them because I'm just one of the little guys.
I was hit by the Wired paywall. Here's the story in *Variety*:
https://variety.com/2024/music/news/record-labels-sue-ai-music-services-suno-and-udio-copyright-infringement-1236045366/
Will be interesting to see if the courts think the record labels have a case.
To be fair, it's not fully clear how IP rights actually work in this instance. If the AI is producing works that sound like the rightholder's work, that would be one thing, but the law doesn't really have a good metric by which to judge "I took thousands of hours of music and taught a computer what music tends to look like."
If the computer was just replicating the original works, that would be different and clearly a copyright violation. But it isn't, exactly, so our 50 year old copyright laws don't adequately protect against it.
not exactly tho, you train one new artist and you get one new artist, you train one ai, this ai's "weights" can now be copied without degradation. the fact that this new ai can be copied without limit changes the equation in my opinion.
This isn’t “taking inspiration.” In fact far from it. The ingestion of the songs alone could and should be considered a commercial use. The explicit goal of ingesting this music is to be able to create new music in the style of the ingested music, in a way that adds significant value to these companies. In no way should this be considered fair use.
While I agree music publishers overwhelming power is a problem I think you’re argument of song’s being similar relating to AI is flawed. It think the argument is closer to sampling. AI is just super sampling, it’s taking the frequencies of what’s been created before and remixing it into a “new” product. The problem is AI doesn’t specifically say what it samples so there’s no way to directly credit or compensate the original artist.
As an example, there’s an artist named Shirley Ellis who created several novelty songs in 1960s. If you listen to the viral TikTok song: “My Arms are Just Fuckin’ Stuck Like This” it undeniably bares more than a passing resemblance to her voice and style. That’s an easy one to pick what it’s sampling from. But it clearly has mixed parts of the song from other sources as well. So how does compensation and accreditation work with that? The answer it doesn’t. So we either have to be comfortable with socializing art while still expecting artist to create with no form of compensation or recognition or we need to ensure AI generated works cannot receive compensation.
This is going to get worse.
AI gets its data from wherever it can.
Every book I have read has "No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from publisher."
Wonder if they will all need to produce permission slips.
The fact that it’s not being reigned in proves that our society doesn’t treat copyright theft fairly. Large companies are more equal than humans in the eyes of the law.
Also let's be honest, AI music software exists solely to mimic copyrighted music. It's only commercial use is to try to sound similar enough to existing music you didn't want to buy the rights to. Their business model is people inputting "give me an Imagine Dragons style song about buying car insurance." These are tools specifically designed to not pay musical artists while using their music.
>Their business model is people inputting "give me an Imagine Dragons style song about buying car insurance."
The previous model was just going to a lesser-known artist and saying "give me a song in the style of (more famous artist)."
It's why South Park had Sia sing the "Lorde songs."
The difference is with before, you have a bunch of separate lesser-known artists supported and a small number of those go on to produce new music and keep things fresh.
unlike with AI, you will have a few single corporations and execs with no artistic talent gobbling up billions of dollars, putting out the same type of music in perpetuity.
Sorry to break it out to you... But this lawsuit isn't about record labels protecting artists at all. Not even indirectly through the means of protecting their own profits. They have already announced their own AI products that will sound like "insert well known artist name here", without paying a dime to "insert well known artist name here." Especially not paying a dime to "insert lesser known artist here" either.
South Park did it as a parody. This is for commercial use.
The previous model also doesn't hold up in court. A famous example of this is Dortios getting their asses handed to them by Tom Waits. Waits didn't want to do a commercial for them and they hired an impersonator to do a song that sounded similar to the one he didn't give them permission to use.
If a person wrote a song and performed it for a commercial like the Imagine Dragons example I listed above, they'd lose miserably in court.
Thats just for their protection because the model overfits.
In the lawsuit they showed you can just type M a r i a h C a r e y and ask for a christmas song and it recreates "All I want for christmas is you"
The locking down of specific artists names seems to just be to hide the fact it used copyrighted songs but their is ways around it very easily.
Yup, I'm not sure gullible someone has to be to not notice what their business model is. They didn't go into business so a bored teenager could make a single funny parody song after dicking around with it for 15 min. Who is the customer that they are trying to attract by training on all major artists' songs?
You are highly misinformed. AI companies have learned from the Greg Rutkowski fiasco. Most AI systems already strip out artist information from training data, and only use metadata like genre or maybe description. Some will actually block your generation request if you use a copyrighted artist name in your prompt. You can see it for yourself, try to generate anything with Aphex Twin on Suno.
Furthermore AI training can use copyrighted music, since it squarely falls under the fair use doctrine. Like sampling it is transformative, it only extracts features and does not retain essence. Like thumbnails that were ruled fair use, it does not use the entire amount or substance of the original works, it would be impossible anyway considering the model size. Text and data mining were already ruled fair use, why would it be different for music which is just a form of data? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Music labels disagree as evidenced by their lawsuit, but fair use stays unless courts rule on a change to copyright law. The only issue could be lack of attribution, since AI companies do not disclose training data. They claim they train on legal music and comissions, make of that what what you will. But even if copyrighted music is ruled out, there are still public domain and free licenses that explicitly or implicitly allow AI training.
I’m just glad the conversation has a little more nuance than it did a few months ago when every idiot on the planet was bleating about how ‘ it’s just like how humans get inspired!’ And ‘ there’s nothing illegal about feeding copyrighted material into AI training’
It's so stupid. I can clearly hear Freddie Mercury's voice on some Suno generated stuff, meanwhile apoligists go "nah bro it's just the same way humans are inspired by previous work, it's 100% transformative". Yeah right
> This is going to get worse.
Yup. This isn't a genie that can be put back into the bottle. You might be able to shutter all the Western/US/EU based AI companies using models they trained on IP. But I guarantee China's courts don't give two shits about western IP rights.
If the tech/creative industry as a whole, finds a way to integrate the technology into a creative process that improves productivity. Then, China/India/wherever, will just become an outsource hub for this.
Personally I'd rather the west continue to advance in this tech at the same time, and the harsh reality is that without monumental amounts of data; it just can't happen.
My personal solution is simple -- if you trained your model on copyrighted material that you didn't license; then your model is legally required to be 100% public domain and usable. Companies could still make money around tooling to use the model and providing hosting solutions (because some of these models will be massive and require real compute resources to use). This would require politicians to actually understand the tech well enough to write the laws and for probably new understandings/distinctions be made in copyright and trademark law for it to happen; ex: Tweaks in fair use, etc.
seems Japan has already took a stance and its gonna consider "fair use" training AI on copyrighted material [https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/](https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/)
So, if the AI is trained correctly the publication (music) is NOT copied into the AI. Some weights in the neural net are adjusted. Neural nets are not secretly a method of impossibly good data compression.
The issue isn't really the AI part.
The issue is putting together your giant dataset illegitimately.
It's been a problem in research for a long time, honestly, there was just no reason for anyone to *really* force the issue until now that it's in the spotlight of a commercial application instead of university research.
Until now? Google put together a giant dataset of copyrighted works without permission and used it in a commercial application, publishers took them to court, Google won. A decade ago.
This isn't incorrect but it's not the full story. The network weights contain embeddings of the concepts they're trained on. They're rarely exact copies, but the network is absolutely taking *something* from the data it ingests. Just because the physical ones and zeros aren't in there, doesn't mean there isn't some kind of infringement.
And neural nets are an impossibly good form of image compression. There's been a lot of research done in using latent diffusion models as an image compression algorithm. You can download vq-compress on github right now. The search space of most modern models is large enough to encode most images that exist. The only issue is that you need to have the model weights on your device and so the encoding only becomes efficient when you need to compress many images.
The only thing we allow to take data away from those publications is a human brain. Any amount of analysis leading to a change in a bit is storing in part a portion of the book or work. AI guys are just moving fast. Nothing about this shit is legal.
That is the exact opposite of the legal precedent on the matter.
Perfect 10 v. Google and Field v. Google
Google was sued about scraping data to inform search engine results, and it was determined that scraping that information, using it for analytics purposes, and even reproducing it to display in search results and thumbnails, did not constitute copyright infringement. That all fell within fair use.
Without that ruling, the basic structure of internet traffic would be illegal, since any transfer of information technically constitutes "reproducing" it.
There is absolutely a legal case about companies illegally gathering copyrighted material for use in training, but that is also an issue that has existed with large, dubiously assembled datasets for *years,* well before generative AI. It's getting the copyrighted material illegitimately that is the problem, not the analyzing it part.
The AI part just happen to be a commercial service that has brought the issue into the spotlight.
It's still an interesting philosophical question about what "learning" is, though. If I read a book and write in style of the author without copying their work explicitly, I am not committing infringement. If a computer program does the same, is that now infringement? How does one break down learning, inspiration, homaging, etc into infringement and non-infringement?
Computers aren't people. There is no reason to assume we should afford the same rights a person has to, say, stable diffusion.
And there is an enormous difference between a human reading or looking at something and internalizing elements of that and feeding the entire corpus of human knowledge into a machine so that it can optimize a set of internal weights by gradient descent. We still don't know what learning is, but it's definitely not that simple.
I'm not arguing for giving rights to programs, rather what is the right of a rightsholder to prevent an entity from using their data to learn without their permission? Learning as a service? Should we be perpetually paying rightsholder for the book we got the library 30 years ago but still leverage in our reasoning, speech, and writing?
The entity isn't a human. It has no right to the data, and the rightsholder has full rights to deny use of their copyrighted information as they see fit.
Also machines don't "learn" like humans do. Humans are an amalgamation of all the things they learned prior, and even studying and attempting to reproduce a famous artists style will never be exact. Machines don't learn like we do, and have no rights.
> ...the rightsholder has full rights to deny use of their copyrighted information as they see fit.
No they don't. I see this line of thinking everywhere and it's not true at all, people just seem to want to believe it is. Copyright isn't absolute and there's a laundry list of exceptions and limitations as to how copyrighted holders can restrict use of their works. You can try to justify this statement all you want like you did when responding to that other guy, but it doesn't change the fact that taken as it is, it's completely untrue.
I didn't predict that the RIAA would win or lose, it's up to the judge to decide and that can always go either way, but you'll still be wrong no matter how that goes since it's objectively and provably incorrect that those who hold a copyright have total control over their works.
FWIW I believe either way these cases go, it'll make little difference to generative AI's proliferation in the industry. The companies building the AI stuff are already mass-licensing and the companies who hold onto IP rights themselves are already building AI stuff. The plaintiffs admit this in the legal filings and press releases, the RIAA isn't doing this because they're anti-AI but because they want an additional revenue stream.
The only thing setting precedence that copyright transfers during the machine learning process would significantly affect are open, freely available models. So given the RIAA wins, they and their billionaire partners effectively have a monopoly over high quality music generation. What a great outcome?
> and the rightsholder has full rights to deny use of their copyrighted information as they see fit.
No, they don't. Between exceptions for fair use, first sale doctrine, etc there are many exceptions. Plus, copyright is about reproduction. We're not talking about things like reproducing Indiana Jones. We're talking about something like creating a new work inspired by Spielberg's works, which is very legal.
> Machines don't learn like we do, and have no rights.
I didn't say this was about machine rights. This is about control of information. Rightsholders want access to information to be tightly controlled, and they want to maximize the monetization of all access to that information. Ultimately, if I buy a book, a copyright holder has no right to tell me how to use the book. If I use that book in training for a person or a computer, that's none of their business. Their concern is only if my output that can't be claimed to be fair use is infringing upon their intellectual property, and "inspired by" is not the same as "replicating" in law.
> Machines don't learn like we do
Does that really matter? The reproduction is where the violation lies.
From the article:
> One example provided in the lawsuit describes how the labels generated songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode” in Suno by using prompts like “1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer guitarist,” along with snippets of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly replicated the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted work.
As long as I do not copy lyrics or any other specifically copyrightable part of a song in my output, I can legally acquire Chuck Berry's discography and recreate a song just like Johnny B Goode by training myself off his copyrighted works. They're not claiming they reproduced a copyrighted work or that they illegally obtained a copy of the music, they're claiming that it was able to create something similar because it was trained on the work. This is not infringement for a human, so why should it be infringement if a computer does it?
>No, they don't. Between exceptions for fair use, first sale doctrine, etc there are many exceptions.
You didn't buy it, and you aren't using it for a parody. Next? Also if you took the entire work of Indiana jones and then just clipped each bit of it and realigned them that would absolutely get you slapped down as illegal, and the argument being made is that's effectively what these companies are doing on a mass scale.
>Does that really matter?
Yes. It's literally the fundamental argument that machines have no rights and thus are going to get bodied by the courts over this entire thing. The spurious argument that "machines learn just like us lol" is bullshit and is going to get annihilated by literally anyone with half a brain in court.
> This is not infringement for a human, so why should it be infringement if a computer does it?
Because humans have the right to do exactly that, and creating a plagarismbot that steals everyones creations and then outputs direct or almost direct copies is inherently different than how a human does that, and thus they can get bent trying to argue it's the same.
You obtaining a copy, learning how to play guitar, then creating your own riff on Johnny B Goode is not the same as Chuck Berry's original performance, and no matter how good you are it will never be identical. That isn't how machines work, and attempting to pretend it is otherwise already labels you as someone not worth arguing with over it.
Here's the thing, if AI can make music that is not in any way like the music it's trained off of, then its use of the music is transformative. No different (legally or ethically) than a human hearing a song and using it as inspiration. Same goes for images, videos, etc. Now if a company releases a song with music samples and doesn't get permission, then it shouldn't matter whether it was made by AI or not.
In short, just take existing copyright law and apply it to AI generated content like anything else. I don't see why the method of creation matters.
The artists that own their own masters need these cases to be fought - the record companies are just the plaintiffs with the cash to do it.
This impacts everyone who records content.
haha...exactly. streaming companies are just as bad. unless they've changes something they hold revenues for years (collecting interest) before disbursing to artists
Record labels have been in slow decline since the internet became fast enough to download music. It's truly becoming a legacy business out of step with the times, riding on past hits as new artists increasingly don't need them.
It shocks me they even still exist. Artists don't even need them any more, this isn't the 70's/80's where you need a record label to get your music out there and on the radio, or setup tours, nowadays you can just throw your music up on the free platforms that anyone can, and promote it yourself through social media, and have a friend be your "manager" and reach out to local venues if you really want to start performing shows.
They've been in panic mode for years now, and they've thrown a lot of lawsuits at various streaming platforms like spotify in the past in order to try to get more money, not shocking they've just moved onto the next thing.
they exist because they have huge money to pour into marketing, most artists do not and at least pop songs depend a lot on marketing nowadays to get good sales/income
I have been waiting for this, record labels, at least the bigger ones I dealt with when I was younger, are greedy and like slave owners and when it comes to copyrights they are down right predators and protective of their gold mines. Copyrights virtually print money for record labels. If you infringe on them and they notice, you are dead meat.
Yes, but they are also the ones with the money to fight the AI companies.
Artists that own their own recordings will benefit from these companies being stopped.
No they won't. RIAA will just immediately go into business making AI models. China's innovations will continue, and they're specifically putting a lot of effort into this field. In a few years the open source models will start to come out via torrent and then no amount of regulation on Earth will stop it.
I'm not worried about some malware infested chinese based model, especially with current US models starting to output garbage due to circular data insertion.
Here we go again.
The RIAA does NOT have a great track record when it comes to dealing with technological innovation.
Storage mediums: Cassette tapes/DAT tapes/CD's & digitization in general.
The internet and the proliferation of compression codecs (MP3 etc.)
They will do what they always do and attempt to litigate the status quo, head in the sand as usual.
My honest and, admittedly ignorant, question is...
How does using AI to generate music differ from Vanilla Ice sampling David Bowie's "Under Pressure" or any of Weird Al Yankovic's parodies?
If you actually took a second to look it up, Vanilla Ice *was* threatened with a lawsuit and had to pay a big settlement out of court for using it.
Weird Al creates parodies, which are protected against copyright. But he gets permission anyways.
Weird Al pays royalties for the direct parodies since while they're parodies, they're also covers.
For style parodies, which makes up half his library, he doesn't pay a dime. This doesn't mean those style parodies can't be *very* close. See:
[Albuquerque](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooI3u4uzEss)
[Rugburns Dick's Automotive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glVrf7J6wss)
Thank you for the clarification. I just picked the first two examples I could think of off the top of my head but I didn't realize that every time another artist samples a hook or covers a song they have to pay royalties.
Strictly speaking, most of Weird Al's oeuvre does not qualify for fair use protection, which is why its a really good thing that he gets permission (on top of just generally being decent). To qualify as satire, it needs to be making some commentary on the original work, and only using as much as necessary of the original work to do so; something like "Fat" doesn't really make any commentary on "Bad", though he's got a much stronger case with something like "Smells like Nirvana", since he's very much making commentary on both Nirvana and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". But in all cases he gets permission, to make sure he doesn't have to hash that shit out in court.
Venues usually buy licenses from performing rights organizations, who then distribute the proceeds to artists. Some info about it here:
https://www.ascap.com/help/ascap-licensing/why-ascap-licenses-bars-restaurants-music-venues
What types of venues are we talking about? Concert halls? Stadiums? Theatres? Or dive bars? Frankly, the latter is the only place I’ve ever seen a local cover band which undoubtedly had paid zero dollars for any licensing. Larger groups that go on tour and play the bigger venues would obviously have their ducks in a row to avoid lawsuits. But I was replying to a post about “local cover bands” where the term “usually” was used to describe something that I believe rarely happens if not never.
guitar center and the like, have to pay a flat fee for customers playing "Stairway To Heaven" and other songs while testing guitars and other gear, theres no supervision just a flat fee they have to pay together with other fees that business pay if they have a public open area where music can be played. For example when you go to a restaurant and they have some music playing at low or whatever volume or even got a silent venue, they have to pay that "tax" to ASCAP/BMI/RIAA or whomever collects it. a cover band that plays gigs at bars etc are covered by the fee the bars pays
I worked at a manufacturing company 10 years ago. Everyday at 2pm they would play a popular song through the PA system. This meant everyone in the building had to stop what they were doing and do exercises/stretches while it played for a couple min.
Wonder if that was a violation. This company could def afford to pay.
Deadmouse was sued for over a million dollars for using a hi-hat from a sample cd he didn't have the rights to.
I also wondered where the fuck the music industry was with lawsuits for ai (given this fact)
Parody is clear of copyright permission (see Pretty Woman by ~~NWA~~ 2 Live Crew).
Weird Al getting permission is a kind gesture, not a requirement. Probably another reason why his parodies have been far more successful than any other parody artist.
Vanilla Ice DID get sued for copyright infringement, by Queen and Bowie.
Source - in the 1990s I wrote an article about copyright infringement. Laws absolutely could have changed by then, and also my research was way more limited than it is today.
Parody has to be a commentary about the work parodied. That case the Supreme Court allowed because they said essentially that the vulgarity of the parody's lyrics was artistically used to criticize the blandness of the original. If you just take a tune and make your own song with rhyming words, that's not legally protected:
> If… the commentary has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh, the claim to fairness in borrowing from another's work diminishes accordingly (if it does not vanish), and other factors, like the extent of its commerciality, loom larger. Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim's (or collective victims') imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing.
>Parody is clear of copyright permission
Theoretically, yes, but there are requirements. You can parody a song and make fun of the song and artists and that's protected. But replacing a songs lyrics with lyrics about food is not doing that. Almost all Weird Al's songs would not be protected parody legally. However, regardless of the legality he gets permission from both the rights owners and the original artist because he believes it's the right thing to do.
supposed to be, Considering the amount of times i hear sampled stuff that almost CERTAINLY wasnt paid for.
It feels like one of those things thast technically not allowed but most cant be bothered pursuing it
I mean, sure, some people do illegal stuff. They also get sued sometimes. Samples in commercial work are almost always paid for, and it can be quite expensive. IIRC Danny Brown said he never broke even from his album Atrocity Exhibition (which is fucking amazing BTW) because he never made more from it than he spent on the samples.
I make music, not on any label or anything. Plenty of underground artists and people don't get clearance. You don't need it if you don't intend to ever commercialize or claim the track as original property either.
However, anything you're hearing on official music platforms or coming from an official label (a licensed business) is almost 100% licensed. They have very, very good algorithms and programs for finding samples and if YOU can notice a specific sample, the programs definitely will. And even I'm not stupid enough to think I'd get away selling any tracks or posting tracks as my own work with uncleared samples.
Vanilla Ice and all the others have to pay a cut to the original creators. Although I think some sampled loops, like the famous "[Amen break](https://youtu.be/v89CjsSOJ_c?si=6f-mWNGt8ImbS9-8)" aren't compensated.
[I heard that Vanilla Ice ended up outright purchasing the rights to the Queen/Bowie song](https://societyofrock.com/vanilla-ice-reveals-how-he-dodged-under-pressure-lawsuit-queen-fans-are-furious-about-it/).. But that's only because doing so was cheaper than the lawsuit was going to be. So now he's technically the owner of the queen song.
This is Vanilla Ice's words on the matter.
The better question is how does using AI to generate music differ from a band creating a new genre and then having all of the copycat bands pop up making similar sounding music. Obviously they all listened to the music made by the first band and copied the sound of the music. Why is it different when someone uses AI to do it?
Taking samples and using them directly in your own music is obviously a copyright violation but creating similar sounding music accounts for 95% of what the music industry does.
I don't think there's any legal precedent for whether encoding data into an AI model is legally equivalent to human learning as of yet, so that's a benefit to these kinds of cases. I think there should be more of them and fast so that we get a set legal framework for newer AI-models.
Brings me back to many fun 'coloured bits' debates from the turn of the century. It'll be fun to see where it ends up this time around.
The big thing I like about current US ruling is that AI generated media (art, text, music) cannot be copyrighted or patented. Meaning that if the data set is properly licensed, then AI paves the way for copyright free materials for larger, indie creative projects. That said, it’s never going to be exactly what people want, which is where human editors come in.
Overall, the impact of generative AI will be on entry level or freelance roles but people will learn to adapt. Like how photoshop or MP3 players came into the scene. And lazy AI generations will be called out for being exactly that. Lazy. Though for search engines, the overflow of AI spam will become a problem.
That's an oversimplification of current US copyright law. For example, I write the lyrics for all my AI generated music by hand, which renders the song copyrightable. The instruments themselves playing in the background may not be copyrightable if they were just the as-generated clips, but the fact I arrange those clips into multi minute long songs likely renders them copyrightable because arrangements of work are copyrightable. It's like how you can make a CD full of public domain songs and it's legal for a person to copy any individual song but if they redistribute the entire CD with the same playlist that's a no-no because they're stealing your arrangement of the works.
So while I detest the present copyright system and would actually like to see it destroyed, it does in fact protect a majority of what I do.
I genuinely believe that one day most music and even movies will be created by AI. A company will specify what they want the main "actors" to look like and how they sound. Then what sort of environment and types of actions they want them to do and the AI will generate it all.
Every type of movie has been made before. Every musical note has been played before. Even humans have trouble can't create anything truly original because it really has all been done before.
>I genuinely believe that one day most music and even movies will be created by AI.
And you realize how that's a nightmare, right?
>Even humans have trouble can't create anything truly original because it really has all been done before.
Not even remotely true.
How is it a nightmare? From a practical standpoint, how is it any different than what we have now? That actor/actress is no more "real" to me as a person than one in a video game or a cartoon. I will likely never meet them or even talk to them. They are literally nothing more than ones and zeros being displayed on my computer screen (or whatever stuff on a TV/theater screen are) so how would an extremely well done version made by an AI be any different?
What brand new revolutionary movie or song have you encountered recently? It's been a very, very long time since I can recall seeing/hearing anything new that wasn't some variation of something that we've had before.
Live non AI performances will become a new genre on its own and I feel that at least for live music, theater and some other things that benefit from having actual people in a place doing something are going to stay strong. Anything on TV or cinemas is probably going to be mostly AI.
I kind of like the idea of some amateur or low budget artist being able to use AI generated music for a project where real music can't be afforded. Hell, I like the idea of anyone using AI to make something cool, for example a musician creating an album cover or a music video without a human artist.
At the same time though, fuck AI and fuck those smarmy cunts who think it's acceptable to steal art and wash it through an algorithm under the guise of "democratizing the creation of art". It's theft, pure and simple. Truly a difficult problem to find an answer to, when AI can be useful to artists, but at the same time it incentivizes less creativity and gives greedy bastards more money without paying artists for their work.
It's really no different than a software developer using commercial music to fine tune an EQ they are working on. I can see it now - the labels will start demanding to know what music they ran through that VST EQ in order to fine tune it.
All music is mimicry.
It is dumb because it is all about record companies wanting to monetize their archives for works that likely don't meet the definition of copyright infringement.
Here's a thought, why not have unsigned artists (who support these AI advancements) pool together and send a ton of material to audio/suno to train on? Some of us have been hosed by the industry for so long, this might be one good way to make a stand against them. I could send decades worth of stuff. Seriously.
You think that allowing people to shovel billions of hours of autonomously generated dreck onto every platform that allows user uploads is going to hose the records industry? If anything it's only going to make your life harder if you're a small independant musician. This is a lawsuit that anyone in the creative space should support because the alternative is the end of 90+% of creative work as a career.
If the music industry were cut down to size, smaller independent artists would have a much better chance. It is still a needs-based economy, where actual musicians can still provide a level of customization that people won't get from a model. Problem is right now is that the copyright industry brings in over 33 billion a year. Just paper - DMCA takedowns, etc. Small independent musicians do not get a cut of that whatsoever. The narrative out there is that they do and that they are protected by it but they're not. So the industry is crying foul over something really they should have zero control over. I hope they lose and I certainly would do my part to help that along.
Well they better sue every fucking kid who ever bought a guitar and learned how to play it from listening to their favorite bands. Fucking Scumbags. Not the kids.
Technically all AI-generated content is free because the network can't hold a copyright. That's the case under the current interpretation of US copyright law anyway.
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Attornies, consultants, and accountants make money when things change.
I’m a law student working at a firm in downtown Seattle for the summer, and can confirm this wholeheartedly.
Only if you're a *rich* IP owner. I own the rights to about a dozen books I've written and published, but I've got no recourse against AI stealing and regurgitating them because I'm just one of the little guys.
Couldn’t they just cut the middleman and use an AI lawyer?
I was hit by the Wired paywall. Here's the story in *Variety*: https://variety.com/2024/music/news/record-labels-sue-ai-music-services-suno-and-udio-copyright-infringement-1236045366/ Will be interesting to see if the courts think the record labels have a case.
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This isn't how the AI works or how intellectual property rights work. They are trained on artists music, not scales and musical theory.
To be fair, it's not fully clear how IP rights actually work in this instance. If the AI is producing works that sound like the rightholder's work, that would be one thing, but the law doesn't really have a good metric by which to judge "I took thousands of hours of music and taught a computer what music tends to look like." If the computer was just replicating the original works, that would be different and clearly a copyright violation. But it isn't, exactly, so our 50 year old copyright laws don't adequately protect against it.
It's like going after other artists for listening to your music and taking inspiration from it. Seems absurd to me.
not exactly tho, you train one new artist and you get one new artist, you train one ai, this ai's "weights" can now be copied without degradation. the fact that this new ai can be copied without limit changes the equation in my opinion.
This isn’t “taking inspiration.” In fact far from it. The ingestion of the songs alone could and should be considered a commercial use. The explicit goal of ingesting this music is to be able to create new music in the style of the ingested music, in a way that adds significant value to these companies. In no way should this be considered fair use.
> They are trained on artists music As does every other musical artist on Earth.
While I agree music publishers overwhelming power is a problem I think you’re argument of song’s being similar relating to AI is flawed. It think the argument is closer to sampling. AI is just super sampling, it’s taking the frequencies of what’s been created before and remixing it into a “new” product. The problem is AI doesn’t specifically say what it samples so there’s no way to directly credit or compensate the original artist. As an example, there’s an artist named Shirley Ellis who created several novelty songs in 1960s. If you listen to the viral TikTok song: “My Arms are Just Fuckin’ Stuck Like This” it undeniably bares more than a passing resemblance to her voice and style. That’s an easy one to pick what it’s sampling from. But it clearly has mixed parts of the song from other sources as well. So how does compensation and accreditation work with that? The answer it doesn’t. So we either have to be comfortable with socializing art while still expecting artist to create with no form of compensation or recognition or we need to ensure AI generated works cannot receive compensation.
I guess Rubbin and Tuggin My Fucking Nips was the last straw.
Couldn't handle gluing their balls to their butthole again.
Is that an AI song?
https://youtu.be/yuoFsi2iIi0?si=rwU0uhPkIEiNJlds Here's the other one https://youtu.be/JRBBcoANRIE?si=AXY8GUSZ4uJDitJq
i'm with the machines on this one, this is peak.
I can't click those at work, but I've heard the song before and was just hoping it wasn't AI haha.
That's the song they said the AI stoled
Right after jizzin' in the hot tub.
That song goes way harder than it has any right to. That and Time to take a shit on the company’s dime, which also slaps something fierce.
Forgive me father, for I have sinned...
AI: Im a baby AI I don't have money, I can pay you in memory blocks
This is going to get worse. AI gets its data from wherever it can. Every book I have read has "No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from publisher." Wonder if they will all need to produce permission slips.
Good. AI is the wild west right now and needs to be reined in for a plethora of reasons besides copyright infringement.
The fact that it’s not being reigned in proves that our society doesn’t treat copyright theft fairly. Large companies are more equal than humans in the eyes of the law.
That's ironic considering music labels are the biggest abusers of copyright law, at the expense of artists, consumers, and everyone else.
Also let's be honest, AI music software exists solely to mimic copyrighted music. It's only commercial use is to try to sound similar enough to existing music you didn't want to buy the rights to. Their business model is people inputting "give me an Imagine Dragons style song about buying car insurance." These are tools specifically designed to not pay musical artists while using their music.
>Their business model is people inputting "give me an Imagine Dragons style song about buying car insurance." The previous model was just going to a lesser-known artist and saying "give me a song in the style of (more famous artist)." It's why South Park had Sia sing the "Lorde songs."
The difference is with before, you have a bunch of separate lesser-known artists supported and a small number of those go on to produce new music and keep things fresh. unlike with AI, you will have a few single corporations and execs with no artistic talent gobbling up billions of dollars, putting out the same type of music in perpetuity.
Sorry to break it out to you... But this lawsuit isn't about record labels protecting artists at all. Not even indirectly through the means of protecting their own profits. They have already announced their own AI products that will sound like "insert well known artist name here", without paying a dime to "insert well known artist name here." Especially not paying a dime to "insert lesser known artist here" either.
South Park did it as a parody. This is for commercial use. The previous model also doesn't hold up in court. A famous example of this is Dortios getting their asses handed to them by Tom Waits. Waits didn't want to do a commercial for them and they hired an impersonator to do a song that sounded similar to the one he didn't give them permission to use. If a person wrote a song and performed it for a commercial like the Imagine Dragons example I listed above, they'd lose miserably in court.
> give me an Imagine Dragons style song Nope, it rejects your request if you mention any specific artist or band in the prompt.
Thats just for their protection because the model overfits. In the lawsuit they showed you can just type M a r i a h C a r e y and ask for a christmas song and it recreates "All I want for christmas is you" The locking down of specific artists names seems to just be to hide the fact it used copyrighted songs but their is ways around it very easily.
Yup, I'm not sure gullible someone has to be to not notice what their business model is. They didn't go into business so a bored teenager could make a single funny parody song after dicking around with it for 15 min. Who is the customer that they are trying to attract by training on all major artists' songs?
Oh I'm sure that *some* do, but probably not all of them.
You are highly misinformed. AI companies have learned from the Greg Rutkowski fiasco. Most AI systems already strip out artist information from training data, and only use metadata like genre or maybe description. Some will actually block your generation request if you use a copyrighted artist name in your prompt. You can see it for yourself, try to generate anything with Aphex Twin on Suno. Furthermore AI training can use copyrighted music, since it squarely falls under the fair use doctrine. Like sampling it is transformative, it only extracts features and does not retain essence. Like thumbnails that were ruled fair use, it does not use the entire amount or substance of the original works, it would be impossible anyway considering the model size. Text and data mining were already ruled fair use, why would it be different for music which is just a form of data? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use Music labels disagree as evidenced by their lawsuit, but fair use stays unless courts rule on a change to copyright law. The only issue could be lack of attribution, since AI companies do not disclose training data. They claim they train on legal music and comissions, make of that what what you will. But even if copyrighted music is ruled out, there are still public domain and free licenses that explicitly or implicitly allow AI training.
I’m just glad the conversation has a little more nuance than it did a few months ago when every idiot on the planet was bleating about how ‘ it’s just like how humans get inspired!’ And ‘ there’s nothing illegal about feeding copyrighted material into AI training’
There’s literally people still saying this, in this or the other thread on article lol. But yes it’s ridiculous
It's so stupid. I can clearly hear Freddie Mercury's voice on some Suno generated stuff, meanwhile apoligists go "nah bro it's just the same way humans are inspired by previous work, it's 100% transformative". Yeah right
> This is going to get worse. Yup. This isn't a genie that can be put back into the bottle. You might be able to shutter all the Western/US/EU based AI companies using models they trained on IP. But I guarantee China's courts don't give two shits about western IP rights. If the tech/creative industry as a whole, finds a way to integrate the technology into a creative process that improves productivity. Then, China/India/wherever, will just become an outsource hub for this. Personally I'd rather the west continue to advance in this tech at the same time, and the harsh reality is that without monumental amounts of data; it just can't happen. My personal solution is simple -- if you trained your model on copyrighted material that you didn't license; then your model is legally required to be 100% public domain and usable. Companies could still make money around tooling to use the model and providing hosting solutions (because some of these models will be massive and require real compute resources to use). This would require politicians to actually understand the tech well enough to write the laws and for probably new understandings/distinctions be made in copyright and trademark law for it to happen; ex: Tweaks in fair use, etc.
seems Japan has already took a stance and its gonna consider "fair use" training AI on copyrighted material [https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/](https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/)
So, if the AI is trained correctly the publication (music) is NOT copied into the AI. Some weights in the neural net are adjusted. Neural nets are not secretly a method of impossibly good data compression.
The issue isn't really the AI part. The issue is putting together your giant dataset illegitimately. It's been a problem in research for a long time, honestly, there was just no reason for anyone to *really* force the issue until now that it's in the spotlight of a commercial application instead of university research.
As soon as you start simping for copyright over research you've lost me. No, capitalism is not more important than human innovation and progress.
Do you seriously think there isn't capital interest behind "human innovation and progress" or "research" here?
Until now? Google put together a giant dataset of copyrighted works without permission and used it in a commercial application, publishers took them to court, Google won. A decade ago.
This isn't incorrect but it's not the full story. The network weights contain embeddings of the concepts they're trained on. They're rarely exact copies, but the network is absolutely taking *something* from the data it ingests. Just because the physical ones and zeros aren't in there, doesn't mean there isn't some kind of infringement. And neural nets are an impossibly good form of image compression. There's been a lot of research done in using latent diffusion models as an image compression algorithm. You can download vq-compress on github right now. The search space of most modern models is large enough to encode most images that exist. The only issue is that you need to have the model weights on your device and so the encoding only becomes efficient when you need to compress many images.
The only thing we allow to take data away from those publications is a human brain. Any amount of analysis leading to a change in a bit is storing in part a portion of the book or work. AI guys are just moving fast. Nothing about this shit is legal.
That is the exact opposite of the legal precedent on the matter. Perfect 10 v. Google and Field v. Google Google was sued about scraping data to inform search engine results, and it was determined that scraping that information, using it for analytics purposes, and even reproducing it to display in search results and thumbnails, did not constitute copyright infringement. That all fell within fair use. Without that ruling, the basic structure of internet traffic would be illegal, since any transfer of information technically constitutes "reproducing" it. There is absolutely a legal case about companies illegally gathering copyrighted material for use in training, but that is also an issue that has existed with large, dubiously assembled datasets for *years,* well before generative AI. It's getting the copyrighted material illegitimately that is the problem, not the analyzing it part. The AI part just happen to be a commercial service that has brought the issue into the spotlight.
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I have been plagiarizing the dictionary my whole life but when a program does it suddenly its bad.
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? You can set permissions on content you upload to a public Drive. If you leave the permissions open, that's on you.
It's insane. No one seem to mind stealing content. Videos are a great example and its difficult to pursue.
It's still an interesting philosophical question about what "learning" is, though. If I read a book and write in style of the author without copying their work explicitly, I am not committing infringement. If a computer program does the same, is that now infringement? How does one break down learning, inspiration, homaging, etc into infringement and non-infringement?
Computers aren't people. There is no reason to assume we should afford the same rights a person has to, say, stable diffusion. And there is an enormous difference between a human reading or looking at something and internalizing elements of that and feeding the entire corpus of human knowledge into a machine so that it can optimize a set of internal weights by gradient descent. We still don't know what learning is, but it's definitely not that simple.
I'm not arguing for giving rights to programs, rather what is the right of a rightsholder to prevent an entity from using their data to learn without their permission? Learning as a service? Should we be perpetually paying rightsholder for the book we got the library 30 years ago but still leverage in our reasoning, speech, and writing?
The entity isn't a human. It has no right to the data, and the rightsholder has full rights to deny use of their copyrighted information as they see fit. Also machines don't "learn" like humans do. Humans are an amalgamation of all the things they learned prior, and even studying and attempting to reproduce a famous artists style will never be exact. Machines don't learn like we do, and have no rights.
> ...the rightsholder has full rights to deny use of their copyrighted information as they see fit. No they don't. I see this line of thinking everywhere and it's not true at all, people just seem to want to believe it is. Copyright isn't absolute and there's a laundry list of exceptions and limitations as to how copyrighted holders can restrict use of their works. You can try to justify this statement all you want like you did when responding to that other guy, but it doesn't change the fact that taken as it is, it's completely untrue.
Guess we will wait and see for this lawsuit then huh? I'm sure when it is finished you'll show up and admit you were incorrect.
I didn't predict that the RIAA would win or lose, it's up to the judge to decide and that can always go either way, but you'll still be wrong no matter how that goes since it's objectively and provably incorrect that those who hold a copyright have total control over their works. FWIW I believe either way these cases go, it'll make little difference to generative AI's proliferation in the industry. The companies building the AI stuff are already mass-licensing and the companies who hold onto IP rights themselves are already building AI stuff. The plaintiffs admit this in the legal filings and press releases, the RIAA isn't doing this because they're anti-AI but because they want an additional revenue stream. The only thing setting precedence that copyright transfers during the machine learning process would significantly affect are open, freely available models. So given the RIAA wins, they and their billionaire partners effectively have a monopoly over high quality music generation. What a great outcome?
> and the rightsholder has full rights to deny use of their copyrighted information as they see fit. No, they don't. Between exceptions for fair use, first sale doctrine, etc there are many exceptions. Plus, copyright is about reproduction. We're not talking about things like reproducing Indiana Jones. We're talking about something like creating a new work inspired by Spielberg's works, which is very legal. > Machines don't learn like we do, and have no rights. I didn't say this was about machine rights. This is about control of information. Rightsholders want access to information to be tightly controlled, and they want to maximize the monetization of all access to that information. Ultimately, if I buy a book, a copyright holder has no right to tell me how to use the book. If I use that book in training for a person or a computer, that's none of their business. Their concern is only if my output that can't be claimed to be fair use is infringing upon their intellectual property, and "inspired by" is not the same as "replicating" in law. > Machines don't learn like we do Does that really matter? The reproduction is where the violation lies. From the article: > One example provided in the lawsuit describes how the labels generated songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode” in Suno by using prompts like “1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer guitarist,” along with snippets of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly replicated the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted work. As long as I do not copy lyrics or any other specifically copyrightable part of a song in my output, I can legally acquire Chuck Berry's discography and recreate a song just like Johnny B Goode by training myself off his copyrighted works. They're not claiming they reproduced a copyrighted work or that they illegally obtained a copy of the music, they're claiming that it was able to create something similar because it was trained on the work. This is not infringement for a human, so why should it be infringement if a computer does it?
>No, they don't. Between exceptions for fair use, first sale doctrine, etc there are many exceptions. You didn't buy it, and you aren't using it for a parody. Next? Also if you took the entire work of Indiana jones and then just clipped each bit of it and realigned them that would absolutely get you slapped down as illegal, and the argument being made is that's effectively what these companies are doing on a mass scale. >Does that really matter? Yes. It's literally the fundamental argument that machines have no rights and thus are going to get bodied by the courts over this entire thing. The spurious argument that "machines learn just like us lol" is bullshit and is going to get annihilated by literally anyone with half a brain in court. > This is not infringement for a human, so why should it be infringement if a computer does it? Because humans have the right to do exactly that, and creating a plagarismbot that steals everyones creations and then outputs direct or almost direct copies is inherently different than how a human does that, and thus they can get bent trying to argue it's the same. You obtaining a copy, learning how to play guitar, then creating your own riff on Johnny B Goode is not the same as Chuck Berry's original performance, and no matter how good you are it will never be identical. That isn't how machines work, and attempting to pretend it is otherwise already labels you as someone not worth arguing with over it.
Here's the thing, if AI can make music that is not in any way like the music it's trained off of, then its use of the music is transformative. No different (legally or ethically) than a human hearing a song and using it as inspiration. Same goes for images, videos, etc. Now if a company releases a song with music samples and doesn't get permission, then it shouldn't matter whether it was made by AI or not. In short, just take existing copyright law and apply it to AI generated content like anything else. I don't see why the method of creation matters.
It'll be interesting to see where this goes, but it's pretty clear the RIAA just wants us to be paying to use *their* generative AI.
Correct. They already announced it. This is simply about wiping out everybody else.
Now everybody's gonna look up Suno and Udio and give them a try.
As yes, the poor record companies. Those well-meaning leaders of industry who always put the artists and fans first.
Would be cool if they DID win and then paid the actual artists who were allegedly infringed upon but yeah, no, probablty not.
The artists that own their own masters need these cases to be fought - the record companies are just the plaintiffs with the cash to do it. This impacts everyone who records content.
Why would you even say “probably”, it’s a guaranteed no that they would not do this.
haha...exactly. streaming companies are just as bad. unless they've changes something they hold revenues for years (collecting interest) before disbursing to artists
Record labels have been in slow decline since the internet became fast enough to download music. It's truly becoming a legacy business out of step with the times, riding on past hits as new artists increasingly don't need them.
It shocks me they even still exist. Artists don't even need them any more, this isn't the 70's/80's where you need a record label to get your music out there and on the radio, or setup tours, nowadays you can just throw your music up on the free platforms that anyone can, and promote it yourself through social media, and have a friend be your "manager" and reach out to local venues if you really want to start performing shows. They've been in panic mode for years now, and they've thrown a lot of lawsuits at various streaming platforms like spotify in the past in order to try to get more money, not shocking they've just moved onto the next thing.
they exist because they have huge money to pour into marketing, most artists do not and at least pop songs depend a lot on marketing nowadays to get good sales/income
I have been waiting for this, record labels, at least the bigger ones I dealt with when I was younger, are greedy and like slave owners and when it comes to copyrights they are down right predators and protective of their gold mines. Copyrights virtually print money for record labels. If you infringe on them and they notice, you are dead meat.
Yes, but they are also the ones with the money to fight the AI companies. Artists that own their own recordings will benefit from these companies being stopped.
No they won't. RIAA will just immediately go into business making AI models. China's innovations will continue, and they're specifically putting a lot of effort into this field. In a few years the open source models will start to come out via torrent and then no amount of regulation on Earth will stop it.
I'm not worried about some malware infested chinese based model, especially with current US models starting to output garbage due to circular data insertion.
Here we go again. The RIAA does NOT have a great track record when it comes to dealing with technological innovation. Storage mediums: Cassette tapes/DAT tapes/CD's & digitization in general. The internet and the proliferation of compression codecs (MP3 etc.) They will do what they always do and attempt to litigate the status quo, head in the sand as usual.
My honest and, admittedly ignorant, question is... How does using AI to generate music differ from Vanilla Ice sampling David Bowie's "Under Pressure" or any of Weird Al Yankovic's parodies?
If you actually took a second to look it up, Vanilla Ice *was* threatened with a lawsuit and had to pay a big settlement out of court for using it. Weird Al creates parodies, which are protected against copyright. But he gets permission anyways.
Wierd Al also pays royalties to original artists. And Vanilla Ice bought the rights to Under Pressure so he could continue to perform the song.
Weird Al pays royalties for the direct parodies since while they're parodies, they're also covers. For style parodies, which makes up half his library, he doesn't pay a dime. This doesn't mean those style parodies can't be *very* close. See: [Albuquerque](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooI3u4uzEss) [Rugburns Dick's Automotive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glVrf7J6wss)
Thank you for the clarification. I just picked the first two examples I could think of off the top of my head but I didn't realize that every time another artist samples a hook or covers a song they have to pay royalties.
Strictly speaking, most of Weird Al's oeuvre does not qualify for fair use protection, which is why its a really good thing that he gets permission (on top of just generally being decent). To qualify as satire, it needs to be making some commentary on the original work, and only using as much as necessary of the original work to do so; something like "Fat" doesn't really make any commentary on "Bad", though he's got a much stronger case with something like "Smells like Nirvana", since he's very much making commentary on both Nirvana and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". But in all cases he gets permission, to make sure he doesn't have to hash that shit out in court.
I wonder about local cover bands. I've seen plenty of Led Zep, Beatles and Pink Floyd cover/tribute bands.
Venues usually buy licenses from performing rights organizations, who then distribute the proceeds to artists. Some info about it here: https://www.ascap.com/help/ascap-licensing/why-ascap-licenses-bars-restaurants-music-venues
“USUALLY” is a huge exaggeration here.
I'm guessing it's one of those crimes/regulations that venues don't care about until they get big enough to get attention?
If they don’t buy a license they run the risk of being sued
I live in a sh\*thole country and venues have to pay it or they get closed down; I would expect in the 1st world its the same as well
What types of venues are we talking about? Concert halls? Stadiums? Theatres? Or dive bars? Frankly, the latter is the only place I’ve ever seen a local cover band which undoubtedly had paid zero dollars for any licensing. Larger groups that go on tour and play the bigger venues would obviously have their ducks in a row to avoid lawsuits. But I was replying to a post about “local cover bands” where the term “usually” was used to describe something that I believe rarely happens if not never.
guitar center and the like, have to pay a flat fee for customers playing "Stairway To Heaven" and other songs while testing guitars and other gear, theres no supervision just a flat fee they have to pay together with other fees that business pay if they have a public open area where music can be played. For example when you go to a restaurant and they have some music playing at low or whatever volume or even got a silent venue, they have to pay that "tax" to ASCAP/BMI/RIAA or whomever collects it. a cover band that plays gigs at bars etc are covered by the fee the bars pays
I worked at a manufacturing company 10 years ago. Everyday at 2pm they would play a popular song through the PA system. This meant everyone in the building had to stop what they were doing and do exercises/stretches while it played for a couple min. Wonder if that was a violation. This company could def afford to pay.
Nah, he didn't have to pay a big settlement. He clearly shows how they are different here: https://youtu.be/a-1_9-z9rbY /s obviously
Deadmouse was sued for over a million dollars for using a hi-hat from a sample cd he didn't have the rights to. I also wondered where the fuck the music industry was with lawsuits for ai (given this fact)
Samples are supposed to be licensed and paid for. Weird Al gets permission.
Parody is clear of copyright permission (see Pretty Woman by ~~NWA~~ 2 Live Crew). Weird Al getting permission is a kind gesture, not a requirement. Probably another reason why his parodies have been far more successful than any other parody artist. Vanilla Ice DID get sued for copyright infringement, by Queen and Bowie. Source - in the 1990s I wrote an article about copyright infringement. Laws absolutely could have changed by then, and also my research was way more limited than it is today.
Pretty Woman was by 2Live Crew. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music is the case.
YES! That's the one. Brainfreeze.
Pauls boutique if made today would cost over $100 million to get all the samples cleared. Plus Apple would never allow any Beatles samples
Just for context for the uninitiated. This is Apple Corps, which is not Apple of iPhone and mac fame
Parody has to be a commentary about the work parodied. That case the Supreme Court allowed because they said essentially that the vulgarity of the parody's lyrics was artistically used to criticize the blandness of the original. If you just take a tune and make your own song with rhyming words, that's not legally protected: > If… the commentary has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh, the claim to fairness in borrowing from another's work diminishes accordingly (if it does not vanish), and other factors, like the extent of its commerciality, loom larger. Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim's (or collective victims') imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing.
>Parody is clear of copyright permission Theoretically, yes, but there are requirements. You can parody a song and make fun of the song and artists and that's protected. But replacing a songs lyrics with lyrics about food is not doing that. Almost all Weird Al's songs would not be protected parody legally. However, regardless of the legality he gets permission from both the rights owners and the original artist because he believes it's the right thing to do.
supposed to be, Considering the amount of times i hear sampled stuff that almost CERTAINLY wasnt paid for. It feels like one of those things thast technically not allowed but most cant be bothered pursuing it
I mean, sure, some people do illegal stuff. They also get sued sometimes. Samples in commercial work are almost always paid for, and it can be quite expensive. IIRC Danny Brown said he never broke even from his album Atrocity Exhibition (which is fucking amazing BTW) because he never made more from it than he spent on the samples.
I make music, not on any label or anything. Plenty of underground artists and people don't get clearance. You don't need it if you don't intend to ever commercialize or claim the track as original property either. However, anything you're hearing on official music platforms or coming from an official label (a licensed business) is almost 100% licensed. They have very, very good algorithms and programs for finding samples and if YOU can notice a specific sample, the programs definitely will. And even I'm not stupid enough to think I'd get away selling any tracks or posting tracks as my own work with uncleared samples.
Vanilla Ice and all the others have to pay a cut to the original creators. Although I think some sampled loops, like the famous "[Amen break](https://youtu.be/v89CjsSOJ_c?si=6f-mWNGt8ImbS9-8)" aren't compensated.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize royalties were broken down to the point of samples of hooks or riffs.
[I heard that Vanilla Ice ended up outright purchasing the rights to the Queen/Bowie song](https://societyofrock.com/vanilla-ice-reveals-how-he-dodged-under-pressure-lawsuit-queen-fans-are-furious-about-it/).. But that's only because doing so was cheaper than the lawsuit was going to be. So now he's technically the owner of the queen song. This is Vanilla Ice's words on the matter.
The better question is how does using AI to generate music differ from a band creating a new genre and then having all of the copycat bands pop up making similar sounding music. Obviously they all listened to the music made by the first band and copied the sound of the music. Why is it different when someone uses AI to do it? Taking samples and using them directly in your own music is obviously a copyright violation but creating similar sounding music accounts for 95% of what the music industry does.
I don't think there's any legal precedent for whether encoding data into an AI model is legally equivalent to human learning as of yet, so that's a benefit to these kinds of cases. I think there should be more of them and fast so that we get a set legal framework for newer AI-models. Brings me back to many fun 'coloured bits' debates from the turn of the century. It'll be fun to see where it ends up this time around.
Well they're currently "legally equivalent" in that there isn't a law preventing either.
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It doesn't but people aren't going to care enough about that to admit it and leave AI alone.
Weird al licenses the music her parodies and cites the original. Vanilla Ice was sued. If AI does not properly credit the source it's a problem
It's an even flimsier case because the AI isn't cut and pasting samples, it actually learned from the input
The big thing I like about current US ruling is that AI generated media (art, text, music) cannot be copyrighted or patented. Meaning that if the data set is properly licensed, then AI paves the way for copyright free materials for larger, indie creative projects. That said, it’s never going to be exactly what people want, which is where human editors come in. Overall, the impact of generative AI will be on entry level or freelance roles but people will learn to adapt. Like how photoshop or MP3 players came into the scene. And lazy AI generations will be called out for being exactly that. Lazy. Though for search engines, the overflow of AI spam will become a problem.
That's an oversimplification of current US copyright law. For example, I write the lyrics for all my AI generated music by hand, which renders the song copyrightable. The instruments themselves playing in the background may not be copyrightable if they were just the as-generated clips, but the fact I arrange those clips into multi minute long songs likely renders them copyrightable because arrangements of work are copyrightable. It's like how you can make a CD full of public domain songs and it's legal for a person to copy any individual song but if they redistribute the entire CD with the same playlist that's a no-no because they're stealing your arrangement of the works. So while I detest the present copyright system and would actually like to see it destroyed, it does in fact protect a majority of what I do.
Well for one it is not actually sampling someone else’s work like Vanilla Ice did.
Let's see em get what they got a grandma for 20 years ago when one of her grand kids downloaded a few songs at like 20k per.
You wouldn't use AI to download a car, would you?!
Disruption is a bitch.
I genuinely believe that one day most music and even movies will be created by AI. A company will specify what they want the main "actors" to look like and how they sound. Then what sort of environment and types of actions they want them to do and the AI will generate it all. Every type of movie has been made before. Every musical note has been played before. Even humans have trouble can't create anything truly original because it really has all been done before.
>I genuinely believe that one day most music and even movies will be created by AI. And you realize how that's a nightmare, right? >Even humans have trouble can't create anything truly original because it really has all been done before. Not even remotely true.
How is it a nightmare? From a practical standpoint, how is it any different than what we have now? That actor/actress is no more "real" to me as a person than one in a video game or a cartoon. I will likely never meet them or even talk to them. They are literally nothing more than ones and zeros being displayed on my computer screen (or whatever stuff on a TV/theater screen are) so how would an extremely well done version made by an AI be any different? What brand new revolutionary movie or song have you encountered recently? It's been a very, very long time since I can recall seeing/hearing anything new that wasn't some variation of something that we've had before.
Live non AI performances will become a new genre on its own and I feel that at least for live music, theater and some other things that benefit from having actual people in a place doing something are going to stay strong. Anything on TV or cinemas is probably going to be mostly AI.
You're just simping for the RIAA in hopes of getting signed. Good luck.
I kind of like the idea of some amateur or low budget artist being able to use AI generated music for a project where real music can't be afforded. Hell, I like the idea of anyone using AI to make something cool, for example a musician creating an album cover or a music video without a human artist. At the same time though, fuck AI and fuck those smarmy cunts who think it's acceptable to steal art and wash it through an algorithm under the guise of "democratizing the creation of art". It's theft, pure and simple. Truly a difficult problem to find an answer to, when AI can be useful to artists, but at the same time it incentivizes less creativity and gives greedy bastards more money without paying artists for their work.
It's really no different than a software developer using commercial music to fine tune an EQ they are working on. I can see it now - the labels will start demanding to know what music they ran through that VST EQ in order to fine tune it.
All music is mimicry. It is dumb because it is all about record companies wanting to monetize their archives for works that likely don't meet the definition of copyright infringement.
I don't care who wins as long as the RIAA loses (and the MPAA, if they ever do something similar)
Not because they think it’s wrong, they just don’t want anyone else to do it.
Begun the lawyer profit war has
sue the air next time because sounds are just vibrating air
Here's a thought, why not have unsigned artists (who support these AI advancements) pool together and send a ton of material to audio/suno to train on? Some of us have been hosed by the industry for so long, this might be one good way to make a stand against them. I could send decades worth of stuff. Seriously.
You think that allowing people to shovel billions of hours of autonomously generated dreck onto every platform that allows user uploads is going to hose the records industry? If anything it's only going to make your life harder if you're a small independant musician. This is a lawsuit that anyone in the creative space should support because the alternative is the end of 90+% of creative work as a career.
If the music industry were cut down to size, smaller independent artists would have a much better chance. It is still a needs-based economy, where actual musicians can still provide a level of customization that people won't get from a model. Problem is right now is that the copyright industry brings in over 33 billion a year. Just paper - DMCA takedowns, etc. Small independent musicians do not get a cut of that whatsoever. The narrative out there is that they do and that they are protected by it but they're not. So the industry is crying foul over something really they should have zero control over. I hope they lose and I certainly would do my part to help that along.
Well they better sue every fucking kid who ever bought a guitar and learned how to play it from listening to their favorite bands. Fucking Scumbags. Not the kids.
Maybe music should never have existed - OpenAI.
Never thought I’d be rooting for record label IP lawyers but here we are
Didn't some guy generate all music that could be made and free use it?
Technically all AI-generated content is free because the network can't hold a copyright. That's the case under the current interpretation of US copyright law anyway.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/music-copyright-algorithm-lawsuit-damien-riehl-a9364536.html