US recording industry body takes two GenAI companies to court
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed two copyright infringement cases based on the mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by music generation services, Suno and Udio.
The claims cover recordings by artists of multiple genres, styles, and eras, which were allegedly used to train the companies’ AI models.
Companies in the generative AI space have been criticised over the sources of the data used to train their models. This year The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post and other papers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, alleging it’s model had been trained in part through copyrighted news stories. In a similar move a class of authors including authors George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Connelly have initiated proceedings.
A report by plagiarism detector Copyleaks released in January found that reproducing entire pieces of text or paraphrased was a significant problem but the distribution was not the same across all areas of interest.
The company’s proprietary AI asked GPT-3.5 about 1,000 queries across 26 subjects looking for answers of 400 words in length found that while the sciences fared poorly – some queries in computer science were 100% replicated from copyrighted sources – the arts and humanities actually fared quite well. Theatre, humanities and English language fared well, scoring only around 5% direct replication.
However, the creative industries are paying close attention to developments in GenAI after a fake collaboration between rapper Drake and The Weeknd appeared online.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centred on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” said RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow added: “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
The cases are looking for an admission that two services infringed plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings; injunctions barring the services from infringing plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings in the future; and damages for the infringements that have already occurred.
While the facts of each case regarding each of the defendants’ unlicensed copying of plaintiffs’ sound recordings are distinct, they also contain a common set of core allegations regarding the training, development, and operation of Suno and Udio.
The action has been greeted with broad approval by the recording industry.
Dr Richard James Burgess MBE, American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) president and chief executive officer, said: “Independent artists, record labels, and songwriters make immense contributions to culture, yet they often suffer the most when services build businesses by using their work without permission or compensation. We stand united with the music community to defend creators’ rights against callous entities like Suno and Udio that aim to steal, misappropriate, and profit from the life’s work of talented performers and writers. We envision a future where the human spirit drives innovation, rather than being exploited by it.”
In a statement, the Music Workers Alliance (MWA) added: “These corporations steal our work to create sound-alikes, effectively forcing us into a ‘training’ role to which we never consented. Their more expensive subscriptions allow users to commercialise the outputs, placing us in unfair competition with an inexhaustible supply of knock-offs of our own work, published without any credit or acknowledgement of our role in their creation, and yet capable of displacing us in record production, film, video, and television scoring, and other markets. That we see none of the profits these corporations reap from the sale of subscriptions to their services is grossly unfair.
“Recording musicians have already experienced one major devaluation of our work due to the failure to regulate the Section 512 DMCA Safe Harbors. Permitting our unauthorised work to be used in the creation of AI Generated ‘music’ will further devalue our work, driving an untold number from the profession. We hope that the court will intervene to put a stop to this exploitive infringement before the damage to our community, the Constitutional principle of copyright, and the culture we all share becomes disastrous and irreversible.”
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