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Suno & Udio To RIAA: Your Music Is Copyrighted, You Can't Copyright Styles

AI music generators Suno and Udio responded to the lawsuits filed by the major recording labels, arguing that their platforms are tools for making new, original music that "didn't and often couldn't previously exist."

"Those genres and styles -- the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music -- are not something that anyone owns," the companies said. "Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself." TorrentFreak reports: "[The labels] frame their concern as one about 'copies' of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology -- that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don't want is competition." The labels' position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren't stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, "outputting a collage of 'samples' stitched together from existing recordings" when prompted by users.

"[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings," Suno explains. "From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings -- what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on." These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it's from that information new music is made.

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that's certainly not the case here. "The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement." With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, "that key point makes all the difference," Suno's conclusion is served raw. "That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product." Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a "no AI" policy on licensees, to claims that they "may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal." The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels' dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. "No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. "Plaintiffs' contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values." You can read Suno and Udio's answers to the RIAA's lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).
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