A new lawsuit filed by record labels Universal, Sony and Warner says their catalogs have been ripped off by two AI music generators. But there’s a twist: It’s not clear the courts are on their side.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST: The music industry is coming for artificial intelligence. A new lawsuit filed by the Big 3 record labels – Universal, Sony, and Warner – says their catalogs have been ripped off by two AI music generators. But there’s a twist. It’s not clear that the courts are on the side of record labels. NPR’s Bobby Allyn explains why.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: The two companies are Suno and Udio. Here’s how they work. Type a description into a search box, and seconds later, you get an AI song. So if you type 70s pop into the search, you might get a song it calls “Prancing Queen.”
ALLYN: Sure does sound a whole lot like Swedish pop group ABBA’s 1976 hit “Dancing Queen,” doesn’t it?
ALLYN: Hmm, artistic inspiration? Mitch Glazier doesn’t think so. He says this is wholesale theft. He’s the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. Along with major record labels, he’s suing to try to put a stop to these services.
MITCH GLAZIER: This case is a basic copyright case. It’s about two companies – Suno and Udio took music made by other people without permission, and without compensation, and make money.
ALLYN: The AI companies wouldn’t make anyone available for an interview. But in statements, they said the tools are not memorizing and regurgitating music. They say, OK, the music might reflect some ideas or themes similar to, say, ABBA, but it’s something new entirely. The case is about two sides focusing on different things. The music industry says, focus on the music that was copied, the input. And the AI companies say, focus on the new thing the tools are spitting out, the output.
RICHARD BUSCH: It’s not a clear-cut case.
ALLYN: That’s Richard Busch. He’s a big deal in the copyright world. He’s a lawyer who won a multimillion dollar case against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over their 2013 song “Blurred Lines” for illegally copying Marvin Gaye. He’s devoted his life to going after artists who have ripped others off. But he thinks the AI companies here might actually have an argument.
BUSCH: How is this different than a human brain listening to music and then creating something that is not infringing, but is influenced.
ALLYN: Busch says both sides of the copyright debate, the input and the output, will be important when hashing this out. I ask Glazier with the recording industry to point to an AI song that best sums up the case. And he said Jason Derulo, who is known in the R&B world for his so-called tags at the beginning of songs. He gives his own name a shoutout – like this.
ALLYN: The AI tools ban searches that specifically name artists. But if you type in contemporary R&B, male singer, soaring ballads, catchy dance pop, you hear – well…
BUSCH: You can hear Jason Derulo’s tag in the output. So pretty convincing proof that the company actually did copy the song without permission.
ALLYN: And Glazier with the recording industry says there are many hundreds of other examples. The suit asks for up to $150,000 per infringed song, so if they win, it could add up fast. The recording industry has something of a playbook for this kind of case. It help bring down music file-sharing service Napster. Nearly 25 years later, AI is the new enemy. Busch, the music copyright lawyer, says, he thinks with time, both sides will reach some kind of deal before this goes to trial.
GLAZIER: Every single time there’s new technology, this is what happens. Everyone gets up in arms. Everyone says this is the end of the world, and then everyone says, wait a second. There’s a way for everybody to make money.
ALLYN: Take streaming services like Spotify. The record industry once resisted it. Now, streaming music has pushed music industry profits to new highs. Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
At the launching ceremony of the Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Club in Nha Trang City on June 26, 2024, Japanese State Minister Yasuhide Nakayama, BGF Chief in Japan, unveiled an ambitious proposal known as the Nha Trang Heart Initiative. This initiative aims to foster closer ties between the residents of Nha Trang City and key cities in Japan, particularly Tokyo and Osaka, by promoting collaboration in technology, education, business, tourism, and culture. Emphasizing a blend of Japanese values such as ethics, humility, responsibility, reliability, fairness, and kindness with Vietnamese qualities of openness, dynamism, adaptability, friendliness, and warmth, the initiative seeks to create symbolic characters in the Age of AI within the AI World Society framework. This initiative is a part of the Shinzo Abe Initiative for Peace and Security, reflecting Japan’s commitment to cooperation and mutual understanding, from regional issues of the Indo-Pacific to global challenges.
The Boston Global Forum has published the special video briefing on AI World Society.
In this 3-minute video, we introduce the key values and contributions of AIWS. The April 30th conference honored Alondra Nelson, former Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden, former Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, with the 2024 World Leader in AI World Society Award.
The main focus of this week was supposed to be the NATO Summit, but some Pennsylvanian man had other ideas. Regardless, since the incident at Trump’s rally is moreso about domestic politics, we will not go in-depth about it here, until it directly affects the Four Pillars. The issues with Biden’s press conferences, gaffes, and internal party drama are covered under this policy as well.
There are some takeaways from the NATO Summit this week vis-a-vis the Four Pillars:
Unfortunately, the content and headlines of these articles are mainly doom and despair. It seems that even despite the Pillars and its associated organizations and partners’ best efforts to maintain the rules-based international order, the world appears headed toward a democratic backsliding – a return to the status quo of bloody interstate conflicts and the return of strongman politics. If anything, events in the past weeks and months should be wake-up calls to those invested in this unprecedented era of relative global peace (with an asterisk) on the importance of what needs to be done to preserve it. The enemies of the liberal democratic order and the Four Pillars are more openly cooperating with each other, emboldened by polarization within the Pillars. More and more sabotage operations by Russia and China within the Pillars’ own borders are found, and that’s only speaking on a physical level – we have not even covered their operations on the Internet. Even though history does not repeat or rhyme (or whatever the pop history saying is), it is interesting that a century on since 1924, the world is once again staring into the abyss of conflict and totalitarianism amidst the domestic malaise of liberal democracies.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Minh Nguyen is the Chief Editor of the Boston Global Forum and a Shinzo Abe Initiative Fellow. She writes the Four Pillars column in the BGF Weekly newsletter.
Pope Francis sends a message to a Hiroshima conference on “AI Ethics for Peace,” emphasizing the symbolic importance of discussing peace in a city scarred by atomic tragedy.
The BGF presented the paper “Spiritual Values of Religions to Build the Knowledge Platform for AI” at the Inter-Religious Dialogue conference June this year, hosted in Castelgandolfo, the summer estate of the Vatican.
