{"id":2104,"date":"2024-08-01T16:18:04","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T16:18:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ai-firms-fire-back-at-copyright-lawsuit-from-music-giants\/"},"modified":"2024-08-01T16:18:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-01T16:18:04","slug":"ai-firms-fire-back-at-copyright-lawsuit-from-music-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ai-firms-fire-back-at-copyright-lawsuit-from-music-giants\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Firms Fire Back At Copyright Lawsuit From Music Giants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tAI music firms Suno and Udio are firing back with their first responses to sweeping lawsuits filed by the major record labels, arguing that they were free to use copyrighted songs to train their models and claiming the music industry is abusing intellectual property to crush competition.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn legal filings on Thursday, the two firms admitted to using proprietary materials to create their artificial intelligence, with Suno saying it was \u201cno secret\u201d that the company had ingested \u201cessentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut both companies said that such use was clearly lawful under copyright\u2019s fair use doctrine, which allows for the reuse of existing materials to create new works.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat Udio has done \u2014 use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyze for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of various musical styles, all to enable people to make their own new creations \u2014 is a quintessential \u2018fair use,\u2019\u201d Udio wrote in its filing. \u201cPlaintiffs\u2019 contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filings, lodged by the same law firm (Latham & Watkins) that reps both companies, go beyond the normal \u201canswer\u201d to a lawsuit \u2014 typically a sparse document that simply denies each claim. Instead, Suno and Udio went on offense, with extended introductions that attempt to frame the narrative of a looming legal battle that could take years to resolve.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn doing so, they took square aim at the major labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment) that filed the case in June<\/a> \u2014 a group that they said \u201cdominates the music industry\u201d and is now abusing copyright law to maintain that power.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat the major record labels really don\u2019t want is competition,\u201d Suno wrote in its filing. \u201cWhere Suno sees musicians, teachers and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSuno and Udio have quickly become two of the most important players in the emerging field of AI-generated music. Udio has already produced what could be considered an AI-generated hit with \u201cBBL Drizzy,\u201d a parody track popularized with a remix by super-producer Metro Boomin and later sampled by Drake himself. And as of May, Suno had raised a total of $125 million in funding to create what Rolling Stone<\/em> called a \u201cChatGPT for music.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn June, the major labels sued both companies, claiming they had infringed copyrighted music on an \u201cunimaginable scale\u201d to train their models. The lawsuits accused the two firms of \u201ctrampling the rights of copyright owners\u201d as part of a \u201cmad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case followed similar lawsuits filed by book authors, visual artists, newspaper publishers and other creative industries, which collectively pose what could be a trillion-dollar legal question: Is it infringement to use vast troves of proprietary works to build an AI model that spits out new creations? Or is it just a form of legal fair use, transforming all those old works into something entirely new?<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Thursday\u2019s response, Suno and Udio argued unequivocally that it was the latter. They likened their machines to a \u201chuman musician\u201d who had played earlier songs to learn the \u201cbuilding blocks of music\u201d \u2014 and then used what they had learned to create entirely new works in existing styles.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThose genres and styles \u2014 the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music \u2014 are not something that anyone owns,\u201d Suno wrote in its filing. \u201cOur intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit from the labels, Suno and Udio say, are thus an abuse of copyright law, aimed at claiming improper ownership over \u201centire genres of music.\u201d They called the litigation an \u201cattempt to misuse IP rights to shield incumbents from competition and reduce the universe of people who are equipped to create new expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth filings hint at how Suno and Udio will make their fair use arguments. The two companies say the cases will not really turn on the \u201cinputs\u201d \u2014 the millions of songs used to train the models \u2014 but rather on the \u201coutputs,\u201d or the new songs that are created. While the labels are claiming that the inputs were illegally copied, the AI firms say the music companies \u201cexplicitly disavow\u201d that any output was a copycat.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat concession will ultimately prove fatal to plaintiffs\u2019 claims,\u201d Suno wrote in its filing. \u201cIt is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process,
invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA spokeswoman and an attorney for the labels did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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