Blake Britton
(Reuters) – Country musician Tift Merritt’s most popular song on Spotify (NYSE: ) is a ballad with lyrics that evoke loneliness and the open road. Prompted by Reuters, artificial intelligence music site Udio instantly produced “a Tift Merritt-esque Americana song,” a ballad with lyrics about “driving the old back roads” while “looking at the fields.” And the sky moves and sways.” Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, told Reuters that the “parody” Udio had created “wouldn’t fit on any of my albums.” “This is great proof that this technology is not transformative at all,” Merritt said. “It’s theft.” Merritt, a longtime artist rights advocate, isn’t the only musician to sound the alarm. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists in publishing an open letter warning that music generated by artificial intelligence trained on their recordings could “destroy creativity” and undermine Human artists are marginalized. Big record labels are worried, too. sony (NYSE: ) Music, Universal Music Group (AS: ) and Warner Music sued Udio and another music AI company called Suno in June, marking the music industry’s entry into a high-stakes copyright battle over AI-generated content. And these are just starting to make their way through the courts. “It’s not creative to take a lot of creative labor and imitate it,” said Merritt, an indie musician whose first record label is now owned by UMG, but who says she has no financial relationship with the company. “This is stealing to compete and replace us.”
When asked to comment for this article, Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending their technology. They issued an initial response in court on Thursday, denying any copyright infringement and arguing the lawsuits were an attempt to silence smaller rivals. They compared record label protests to past industry concerns about synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations replacing human musicians. Artist’s song. But the new lawsuit says Suno and Udio may be required to copy elements of songs by Mariah Carey, James Brown and others, and emulate the likes of ABBA and Bruce Springsteen artists’ voices, suggesting that they abused the record labels’ copyrighted discographies to train their music. Mitch Glazier, chief executive of the RIAA music industry trade group, said the lawsuits “document the shameless copying of vast quantities of records in an effort to flood the market with cheap knockoffs and take away Real people listen and earn”. Artist and songwriter. “Artificial intelligence has huge promise, but only if it is built on a sound, responsible, and permissioned foundation,” Glazier said. “
Warner Music referred Reuters to the Recording Industry Association of America when asked to comment on the cases. Sony and Universal Music did not respond.
The labels’ claims echo those made by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits involving chats that use generative AI to create text, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude robot. Those lawsuits are still in the early stages of being pending. Both sets of cases raise new questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for artificial intelligence using copyrighted material to create new things. The record company’s case, which could take years to play out, raises questions unique to the subject — music. Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright analysis, said the interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements makes certain aspects of a copyrighted song more difficult to determine than a work such as a written text. When parts are violated becomes more difficult. “There’s more to music than just a flow of words,” McBrearty said. “It has pitch, it has rhythm, it has harmonic background. It’s a richer combination of different elements, which makes it a little bit less simple.” Some claims in AI copyright cases may hinge on what the AI system’s output is like A comparison between allegedly misused training materials would require an analysis similar to the one that has challenged judges and juries in music cases. In 2018, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were criticized for the similarities between their hit song “Blurred Lines” and Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Marvin Gaye’s estate lost a lawsuit brought by the estate in what a dissenting judge called a “dangerous precedent.” But artists like Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have since dismissed similar complaints about their songs.
Suno and Udio argued in very similar court filings that their works did not infringe copyright, saying U.S. copyright law protects sound recordings that “imitation or imitation” of other recorded music. Botts Law Firm’s intellectual property partners are tracking these new cases. Even without this complexity, rapidly evolving AI technologies are creating new uncertainties at all levels of copyright law, Abbott said. Whose fair use? If, as many expect, AI cases come down to a “fair use” defense against infringement claims, then the complexity of music may ultimately matter less — another area of U.S. copyright law rife with unanswered questions. Fair use promotes free speech by allowing unauthorized use of a copyrighted work in certain circumstances, and courts typically focus on whether the new use changes the original work. Defendants in AI copyright cases argue that their products make fair use of human creations, and any court ruling to the contrary would be catastrophic for the potentially multi-trillion dollar AI industry.
Suno and Udio said in answers to the record label lawsuit on Thursday that their use of existing recordings to help people write new songs “is a classic ‘fair use.'” Legal experts said fair use could make or break a case, but for now No court has yet ruled on issues in the field of artificial intelligence. Abbott said it may be harder for music-generating AI companies to prove fair use than for chatbot makers, who can summarize and synthesize text in ways that courts may be more likely to consider transformative. Imagine, she said, that a student uses AI to generate a report about the American Civil War that contains text from a novel about the subject, while someone asks the AI to create new music based on existing music. The student example “certainly feels like a different purpose than logging into a music generation tool and saying, ‘Hey, I want to make a song that sounds like a top 10 artist,'” Abbott said. “The purpose is very similar to the artist’s original purpose.” Last year’s Supreme Court ruling on fair use could have a huge impact on music cases because it focuses on whether new uses serve the same commercial purpose as the original work. That argument is a key part of Suno and Udio’s complaint, which alleges the companies use the labels’ music “with the ultimate goal of poaching listeners, fans and potential licensees of the recordings.” [they] Merritt said she worries tech companies may try to use artificial intelligence to replace artists like her. .
