Major music labels are adopting AI startups they believe are trained on their songs without paying. Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group have sued music generators Suno and Udio for allegedly infringing their copyrighted works on a “massive scale”.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has launched lawsuits and wants to establish that “there is nothing that exempts AI technology from copyright law or excuses AI companies from playing by the rules.”
The music labels’ lawsuits in US federal court accuse Suno and Udio of removing their copyrighted tracks from the internet. The lawsuits against the AI companies reportedly seek injunctions against future use and damages of up to $150,000 for infringed work. (If a court finds them liable, it could reach a very large sum.) The suits aim to establish licensed training as the only acceptable industry framework for AI to advance — while instilling fear in companies that train their models without their consent. .
Suno AI and Udio AI (Uncharted Labs runs the latter) are startups with software that creates music based on text input. Previous It is a partner of Microsoft For the CoPilot music creation tool. The RIAA claims that the services’ reproduced tracks are unusually similar to existing works to the extent that they should be trained on copyrighted songs. It also alleges that the companies did not deny that they were trained in copyright work, instead hiding their training as “confidential business information” and standard industry practices.
according to The Wall Street Journalclaims to blame AI generators that produce songs that sound remarkably similar to The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” among others. They also claim that AI services have produced vocals indistinguishable from artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and ABBA.
Wired reports that one of the examples cited in the lawsuit uses the phrase “1950s rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, 12 bars” from one of the AI tools, almost matching Chuck Berry’s early classic “Johnny B. Goode.” , detailing how he played the same-sounding song. blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singing guitarist,” along with some of Berry’s lyrics. The suit claims the generator almost perfectly reproduces the original track’s “Go, Johnny, go, go” chorus.
To be clear, the RIAA does not defend on the principle that all artificial intelligence training on copyrighted works is wrong. Instead, it says it’s illegal to do so without a license and consent, meaning the labels (and probably to a lesser extent the artists) don’t make any money from it.
The recording industry is working on its own AI deals with what music licensing believes is fair for its results. One of them agreement Between Universal and SoundLabs, it allows the latter to create vocal models for artists, while allowing singers to control ownership and output. The label also partnered with YouTube on an AI license and royalty deal. Universal also represents Drake CD track against Kendrick Lamar since the beginning of this year, artificial intelligence-generated copies of the voices of Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg have been used.
“There is room for AI and human creators to build sustainable, complementary relationships,” the filing against Suno says. “This can and should be achieved through a well-established mechanism of free market licensing that provides due respect to copyright holders.”
according to BloombergSuno co-founder Mikey Shulman he said said in April that the company’s practices were “legitimate” and “fairly consistent with what other people are doing.” In general, the AI industry is trying to race toward a limit where its tools are considered too widespread before anyone can do anything about how they train their models.
“We work very closely with lawyers to make sure what we’re doing is legal and industry standard,” Suno’s founder said in April. “If the law changes, obviously we’re going to change our business one way or another.”
