What the RIAA Lawsuits Mean for AI and Copyright

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Udio and Suno are not, despite their names, the hottest new restaurants on the Lower East Side. These are AI startups that allow people to generate incredibly real-sounding songs, with instruments and vocal performances, from prompts. And on Monday, a group of major record labels sued them, alleging copyright infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale,” saying the companies can only do so because they illegally ingested music. huge amounts of copyrighted music to train their AI models.

These two lawsuits contribute to a growing pile of legal problems for the AI ​​industry. Some of the most successful companies in the industry have trained their models with data acquired through unauthorized scraping of huge amounts of information from the Internet. ChatGPT, for example, was initially trained on millions of documents collected from links posted on Reddit.

The lawsuits, brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), target music rather than writing. The New York Times‘ against OpenAI, they ask a question that could reshape the technology landscape as we know it: can AI companies simply take what they want, turn it into a product worth billions, and claim it’s is fair use?

“This is the key issue that needs to be addressed, because it affects all sorts of different industries,” said Paul Fakler, a partner at law firm Mayer Brown who specializes in intellectual property cases.

Udio and Suno are both relatively new, but they’ve already made a splash. Suno was launched in December by a Cambridge-based team that previously worked for Kensho, another AI company. It quickly entered into a partnership with Microsoft which integrated Suno with Copilot, Microsoft’s AI chatbot.

Udio launched this year, raising millions of dollars from heavyweights in the tech investing world (Andreessen Horowitz) and the music world (Will.i.am and Common, for example). Udio’s platform was used by comedian King Willonius to generate “BBL Drizzy,” the Drake breakaway track that went viral after producer Metro Boomin remixed it and released it to the public for all to see. the world can rap it.

The RIAA’s lawsuits use lofty language, asserting that this litigation aims to “ensure that copyright continues to encourage human invention and imagination, as it has for centuries.” That sounds good, but ultimately the incentive we’re talking about is money.

The RIAA claims that generative AI poses a risk to record labels’ business models. “Rather than licensing copyrighted sound recordings, potential licensees interested in licensing such recordings for their own purposes could generate AI-like sound at virtually no cost,” the lawsuits say, adding that such services could “flood the market with ‘copycats’ and ‘soundalikes,’ disrupting an established sample licensing business.”

The RIAA is also seeking damages of $150,000 per infringing work, which, given the massive bodies of data typically used to train AI systems, is a potentially astronomical figure.

The RIAA’s lawsuits included examples of music generated with Suno and Udio and comparisons of their musical notation to existing copyrighted works. In some cases, the generated songs featured similar short phrases – for example, one began with the sung line “Jason Derulo” in the exact cadence with which the real Jason Derulo begins many of his songs. Others had extended sequences of similar notation, as in the case of a track inspired by Green Day’s “American Idiot.”

One song began with the sung phrase “Jason Derulo” in the exact cadence that the real Jason Derulo begins most of his songs with.

This seems Pretty damning, but the RIAA isn’t claiming that these specific soundtracks infringe copyright – instead, it’s claiming that AI companies used copyrighted music as part of their training data.

Neither Suno nor Udio have made their training datasets public. And both companies remain vague about the sources of their training data – although this is normal in the AI ​​sector. (OpenAI, for example, sidestepped the question of whether YouTube videos were used to train its Sora video model.)

The RIAA lawsuits note that Udio CEO David Ding said the company was training on “higher quality” music that is “available to the public” and that a Suno co-founder wrote in Suno’s official Discord that the company was training with a “mix of exclusive music and public data.” »

Fakler said the lawsuit’s inclusion of examples and comparisons of ratings was “far-fetched,” saying it went “far beyond” what would be necessary to assert legitimate grounds for a lawsuit. On the one hand, the labels may not own the composition rights to the songs allegedly ingested by Udio and Suno for training purposes. Rather, they own the copyright to the sound recording, so showing similarity in musical notation does not necessarily help in a copyright dispute. “I think it’s really designed for optics for PR purposes,” Fakler said.

Additionally, Fakler noted, it is legal to create a similar audio recording if you own the rights to the underlying song.

When reached for comment, a Suno spokesperson shared a statement from CEO Mikey Shulman stating that its technology is “transformative” and that the company does not allow prompts naming existing artists. Udio did not respond to a request for comment.

But even if Udio and Suno used the record labels’ copyrighted works to train their models, there remains one very big question that could trump all else: Is this fair use?

Fair use is a legal defense that allows the use of copyrighted material in the creation of a significantly new or transformative work. The RIAA says the startups can’t claim fair use, saying Udio and Suno’s releases are intended to replace real recordings, that they are generated for commercial purposes, that the copying was extensive rather than selective and , finally, that the result This product constitutes a direct threat to the activity of labels.

In Fakler’s view, startups have a strong fair use argument as long as the copyrighted works have only been copied temporarily and their defining features have been extracted and summarized in the weights of an AI model.

“It’s about extracting all these things, just like a musician would learn these things by playing music.”

“That’s how computers work: They have to make these copies, and then the computer analyzes all of that data so it can extract the non-copyrighted elements,” he said. “How do we construct songs that a listener will understand as music and that have various characteristics that are commonly found in popular music? It’s about extracting all of that, just like a musician would learn these things by playing music.”

“In my view, this is a very strong fair use argument,” Fakler said.

Of course, a judge or jury may disagree. And what came out of the discovery process—if these lawsuits were to succeed—could have a significant effect on the case. Which pieces of music were extracted and how they ended up in the training set may matter, and the details of the training process could undermine a fair use defense.

We’re all in for a very long journey as the RIAA lawsuits, and others like them, play out in court. From texts and photos to now sound recordings, the question of fair use hangs over all these cases and over the AI ​​industry as a whole.



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