Music label AI lawsuits create new copyright conundrum for US courts Author: Reuters

By Blake Brittain

(Reuters) – Country musician Tift Merritt’s most popular song on Spotify (NYSE:), “Traveling Alone,” is a ballad with lyrics evoking solitude and the open road. Inspired by Reuters to create an “American song in the style of Tift Merritt,” artificial intelligence music website Udio immediately generated “Holy Grounds,” a ballad with lyrics about “driving down old back roads” while “watching the fields and the sky change and sway.” Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, told Reuters that the “imitation” Udio created “is not suitable for any of my albums.” “It’s a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all,” Merritt said. “It’s theft.” Merritt, who has long been an advocate for artists’ rights, is not the only musician sounding the alarm. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists in an open letter warning that AI-generated music trained on their recordings could “sabotage creativity” and marginalize human artists. Major record labels are also worried. Sony (NYSE:) Music, Universal Music Group (AS:) and Warner Music sued Udio and another AI music company called Suno in June, entering the music industry into a fierce copyright battle over AI-generated content that’s just starting to make its way through the courts. “Taking a huge amount of creative work and then trying to imitate it is not creative,” said Merritt, an independent musician whose original record label is now owned by UMG but who said she has no financial stake in the company. “It’s stealing to compete and replace us.”

Suno and Udio, when asked to comment for this story, referred to earlier public statements defending their technology. They filed their first responses in court on Thursday, denying any copyright infringement and arguing that the lawsuits were attempts to stifle smaller competitors. They compared the labels’ protests to earlier industry concerns about synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations replacing musicians. UNCHARGED TERRAIN The companies, which have raised venture capital funding, have said they prohibit users from creating tracks that clearly imitate top artists. But the new lawsuits say Suno and Udio could be encouraged to play elements of songs by Mariah Carey, James Brown and others, and to imitate the voices of artists such as ABBA and Bruce Springsteen, showing that they were abusing the labels’ catalog of copyrighted recordings to train their systems. Mitch Glazier, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a music industry trade group, said the lawsuits “document the brazen copying of a multitude of recordings in order to flood the market with cheap imitations and draw listeners and revenue away from real artists and songwriters.”“AI holds great promise—but only if it is built on a solid, responsible, licensed foundation,” Glazier said.

Asked for comment, Warner Music referred Reuters to the RIAA. Sony and UMG did not respond.

The record labels’ claims echo those of novelists, news agencies, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits involving chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still ongoing and in the early stages. Both sets of cases raise new questions for courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI’s use of copyrighted material to create something new. The record label cases, which could take years to resolve, also raise questions specific to their subject matter — music. The interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements can make it difficult to determine when parts of a copyrighted work have been infringed compared with works like written text, said Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright analysis. “Music has more factors than just a stream of words,” McBrearty said. “It has pitch, rhythm and harmonic context. It’s a richer mix of different elements that make it a little less straightforward.” Some claims in AI copyright cases can rely on comparisons between the AI ​​system’s output and the material allegedly misused to train it, requiring analysis that poses challenges for judges and juries in music cases. In a 2018 decision that the dissenting judge called a “dangerous precedent,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a case brought by Marvin Gaye’s estate over the similarity of their hit “Blurred Lines” to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” But artists including Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have since dismissed similar claims involving their own songs.

Suno and Udio argued in very similar court papers that their results did not violate copyright law, saying that U.S. copyright law protects sound recordings that “imitate or simulate” other recorded music. “Music copyright has always been a chaotic universe,” said Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at Baker Botts in New York who tracks new cases. And even without that complication, Albert said the rapidly evolving AI technology is creating new uncertainty at every level of copyright law. WHOSE FAIR USE? The complexities of music may matter less if, as many expect, AI cases come down to a “fair use” defense against infringement claims — another area of ​​U.S. copyright law fraught with open questions. Fair use promotes free speech by allowing unauthorized uses of copyrighted works in certain circumstances, and courts often focus on whether new uses transform the original works. Defendants in AI copyright cases have argued that their products are fair uses of human creations and that any court ruling to the contrary would be disastrous for the potentially multi-trillion dollar AI industry.

Suno and Udio said in their responses to the labels’ lawsuits Thursday that their use of existing recordings to help people create new songs “is the epitome of ‘fair use.’” Fair use can be a deciding factor in cases, legal experts said, but no court has yet ruled on the matter in the context of AI. Albert said AI music-generating companies may have a harder time proving fair use compared with chatbot makers who can summarize and synthesize text in ways that courts might find transformative. Imagine a college student using AI to generate a report on the U.S. Civil War that includes text from a novel about the subject, she said, compared with someone asking the AI ​​to create new music based on existing music. The college student example “certainly seems like a different goal than logging into a music-generating tool and saying, ‘Hey, I want to make a song that sounds like a song by a top 10 artist,’” Albert said. “The goal is pretty similar to what an artist would have in the beginning.” The Supreme Court’s ruling on fair use last year could have a huge impact on music cases, because it focuses largely on whether a new use serves the same commercial purpose as the original work. That argument is a key part of Suno and Udio’s complaints, which say the companies are using the labels’ music “with the ultimate goal of poaching listeners, fans and potential licensees of the sound recordings that (they) have copied.” Merritt said she worries that tech companies could try to use AI to replace artists like her. If musicians’ songs can be extracted for free and used to imitate them, she said, the economics are simple. “The robots and AI don’t get royalties,” she said.