By: Jerry Zhang

On Monday, June 24, record industry giants including Sony, Universal, Warner, and more sued Udio and Suno, two AI music companies. They have accused the AI companies of using copyrighted sounds and songs to train their AI models.

Artificial intelligence learns by processing data which is essential for their “intelligence.” These record companies allege that Udio and Suno used their copyrighted music without permission or payment.

“Building and operating a service like Udio’s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’ to generate outputs,” said the RIAA’s suit. “For Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings.”

However, Udio denies these charges. They claim that the use of others’ music does not violate copyright law as “our model has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music. The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one.” In a further statement, the CEO of Suno, Mikey Shulman, defended his company by stating “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.”

This case is similar to several other lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies. Late last year, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming that its news articles were illegally used to train ChatGPT. Another lawsuit was filed against Stability AI by Getty Images for a similar reason: using their photographs to train the image-generating artificial intelligence. So far, the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI has not resulted in an outcome; however, Stability AI was found to have violated Getty Images’ copyright.

With AI still in its infancy, whether or not these AI companies win, these lawsuits can redefine the entire industry, setting limits on what is allowed or not.

 
Links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/arts/music/record-labels-ai-lawsuit-sony-universal-warner.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.penningtonslaw.com/news-publications/latest-news/2024/generative-ai-in-the-courts-getty-images-v-stability-ai
https://www.riaa.com/record-companies-bring-landmark-cases-for-responsible-ai-againstsuno-and-udio-in-boston-and-new-york-federal-courts-respectively/