AI manufacturers admit to training with copyrighted music
The start-ups Suno and Udio openly admit to training with copyrighted music and invoke a special feature of US legislation.
(Image: Shutterstock/Sansoen Saengsakaorat)
AI developers Suno and Udio have responded to the lawsuit filed by several music publishers for copyright infringements in the USA. In an initial statement, both companies admitted that they had trained their AIs with copyrighted material. The US magazine Billbord quotes the companies as saying that they had used "essentially all music files of reasonable quality available on the open Internet" for training. Until now, the companies had not published any details of their training material with regard to possible copyright infringements.
The defense strategy of the two companies focuses on a special case in US copyright law: the so-called Fair Use Index. This allows the use of protected material, for example, for quoting, research or certain non-commercial purposes. When this is the case is often at the discretion of the courts. There are numerous rulings on when the invocation of "fair use" was lawful and when it was not.
After the music publishers filed suit in June, Suno and Udio hired the same law firm, Latham & Watkins, to develop a joint defense strategy. The law firm had already represented other AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, against lawsuits filed by various authors and the New York Times, reports the US magazine Billboard.
Impact on Europe
The eagerly awaited proceedings could also have an impact on Suno and Udio's online offerings in Europe, where the AI Regulation has been in force since the beginning of August. This is because European copyright law does not recognize "fair use" as in the USA. In this country, the use of digital content for the training of AI models is permitted under Section 44b of the Copyright Act as long as the author has not formulated a machine-readable reservation. There is currently a dispute in the courts as to what constitutes a "machine-readable reservation" and what does not.
In the case of music recordings, however, in addition to the copyright of the lyricists and composers, there is also the ancillary copyright. This protects, among other things, the musicians and technicians involved in the recording. Unlike copyright law, ancillary copyright law has no exceptions for the use of recordings for AI training.
Experts expect that the proceedings in the USA could take years. European publishers and AI developers will be watching this very closely. Due to the different legal situation, it is quite possible that the case law here will ultimately turn out differently than in the "land of opportunity".
(hag)
