By: Elaine Xu

Imagine you see other kids building awesome castles with different towers and moats. You watch and learn their techniques, then create your own sandcastle masterpiece! But what if the other kids got upset, saying you copied their ideas?

That’s basically what happened here. On June 24, big music companies, including Sony and Warner, sued two new music maker websites, Udio and Suno. These websites let you type in what kind of music you want, and their technology creates a song in seconds, like magic!

The music companies sued the AI music maker websites because they said that these websites learned how to make music by secretly copying parts of songs created by their artists without asking permission first.

Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organization, agrees with the big music companies. “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” he said in a statement.

The website makers say they’re not copying; just learning, like how you might listen to lots of music before writing your own song. They say they use what they learned from many different songs to create completely new music.

In an emailed statement, Suno’s chief executive, Mikey Shulman, defended his company. “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,” Shulman said.

Shulman’s argument is important because it affects the future of music and inventions. In the future, will it be okay to use ideas from something you already know to create something new directly, or should you always ask permission first?

Link to Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/arts/music/record-labels-ai-lawsuit-sony-universal-warner.html?searchResultPosition=2
Image Credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/arts/music/record-labels-ai-lawsuit-sony-universal-warner.html?searchResultPosition=2