“Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet.”
“Rather than trying to argue that Suno was not trained on copyrighted songs, the company is instead making a Fair Use argument to say that the law should allow for AI training on copyrighted works without permission or compensation.”
Archived (also bypass paywall): https://archive.ph/ivTGs
Oh, so when a ai company wants to use copyrighted works without permission or compensation it’s “fair use” but when I do it, it’s “piracy” and “I need to leave before the cops are called”.
Abolish copyright.
I’m fine with copyright, provided it’s limited to only a few years and can’t ever be extended. This “lifetime of the author plus 50 years” shit is what makes it terrible.
Why?
Because it manufactures scarcity and causes us to repeatedly expend energy reproducing things that could be otherwise copied and enjoyed at near-zero cost.
We keep inventing silly rules in order to put off dealing with the existential threat our mode of production represents. “Copyright” is the first and silliest of those rules.
Are you taking about patents? Cause a world without copyright doesn’t sound very fun to me. Or anyone in a remotely creative job.
Ever for patents: There’s a reason innovations are protected literally anywhere in the world, but the durations being ever longer is a real problem (5 years would probably be fine). The basic concept is still just straight up necessary.
No, i’m talking about all intellectual works (copyrights and patents being some of the categories commonly used)
Humans need no incentive to create new works, but the way we distribute resources requires us to make these rules so that those creators fit within our ‘work for food’ production model.
Even a modest UBI would support most creative endeavors, but instead of that we have a “monetize your work or starve” arrangement.
I agree that the current state of laws is overkill by about an order of magnitude, and that’s obviously bad.
But you do need some amount of protection for works created. Imagine being a photographer, you can’t make money. You make some nice photos, and how do you sell them? If you send a sample to someone, they can just print that and you can do nothing. There’s no copyright after all. It isn’t somthing you can protect legally, so you can’t stop them or sue them for compensation. There’s also a flip side from the corporate perspective: You might find employment as a full time photographer in places that need them, but what about all the companies that just need an occasional picture? You can’t contract it out, because you have no way to negotiate anything if their work isn’t protected, you can’t even look at samples cause nobody would ever dare showing any or they might just be used.
I think you have to abolish hierarchical society first. Which I also think should be done. But if you get rid of rules protecting creative endeavors before getting rid of the shitheel corporations it gets rid of creative endeavor more than it gets rid of the corporate bastards. The problem with copyright as it stands is how much the corporate bastards have twisted it over time to benefit them instead of the collective us.
rules protecting creative endeavors
that’s not what copyright does.
You don’t have to abolish hierarchy, you just have to de-tangle work from sustenance-level resource distribution. A UBI sufficient for living would be enough. Even providing universal housing and reducing the workweek would help.
Copyright simply makes creative work profitable, but profit isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for creative work.
Oh my desire to abolish hierarchical society is… Pretty core to who I am lol. So there was some bias in that. Yeah there’s ways to make get rid of copyright, still have professions, and still have a hierarchy, but at a certain point you’re building a gentler form of capitalism instead of treating people with the true respect and dignity they deserve. I’m willing to accept I’m pretty radical on this particular set of views.
Also yes. Everyone should get UBI and the billionaires pockets should be where we get the money from
I guess my point is that retaining copyright isn’t necessarily dependent on abolishing hierarchies altogether. People imagine it would take a complete re-imagining of our economy to abolish copyright (and it isn’t a small thing, to be sure), but it’s honestly less intensive than most people think.
Especially since most of the economic value of copyright is held by large corporations, not private individuals.
Great AI gets more rights than us too!
You’re free to learn from any piece of music too. Whether AI is actually learning is still debatable but you have the same rights right now.
I’m still on the edge tbh I feel like it is learning and it is transformative but it’s just too powerful for our current copyright framework.
Either way, that’ll be such a headache for the transformative work clause of copyright for years to come. Also policing training would be completely unenforcable so any decision here would be rather moot in real world practice either way.
Also policing training would be completely unenforcable
But…it’s already been enforced, several times.
You’re free to learn from any piece of music too
Did they pay to access those songs, or did they do some piracy? I have to pay to listen to a bunch of copyrighted music.
Also policing training would be completely unenforcable
That’s where laws would come in. Obviously it would have civil law, not criminal law, but making sure it would be enforceable would have to be part of such laws. For example, forcing model makers to disclose their training dataset in one way or another.
But you can already train models at home also you can just extend existing models with new training data. Will that be regulated too? How?
They‘re literally already about to heavily regulate hobby AI to ensure giant corporations that hoard all our information get to make even more mountains of money with it. The idea that anyone gets to use any media for machine learning is already a relict of the past and in fact not remotely comparable to learning things for yourself. Especially not in the legal sense. Did you really naively believe AI will democratize anything for even a second?
We are free to learn, but learning is not free.
Freedom vs cost. One cannot pickup a skill without time, effort and more importantly access to guidance and a vast library of content. Same applies to man or machine. The difference is how corporations have essentially reinvented piracy to facilitate their selfish ends after decades of dictating what’s right with DMCA, DRM and what not.
I think you’re allowed to listen to every song on the open internet too.
But not making business out of them.
If you get an idea from a song, you are 1000% free to turn that into new art. This is the fair use argument.
I agree with the logic, but I don’t think it should apply to LLMs—a humans-only law, if you will.
That’s sort of currently the law with copyright in the US. You can’t get a copyright on material made completely by an AI. Only if a human interfered can you get a copyright, and most likely only on the parts that the human interfered with.
Source: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf (See header II. The Human Authorship Requirement)
TL;DR
the Office states that “to qualify as a work of ‘authorship’ a work must be created by a human being” and that it “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”
I think the key is that an LLM can’t have ideas. Its creative endeavors aren’t creative. Art is about the craft and the message and an LLM lacks that context. Like. The best an LLM can do is produce the kinds of music Drake does that is meant to pacify people into continuous consumption
I had a similar thought after I wrote this. LLMs aren’t creating anything so much as style-copying. They’re unique productions, insomuch as rearranging notes or pixels makes something unique, but I think creativity requires conscious agency, which LLMs definitely do not have.
Also, I don’t need to copy the entirety of Drake’s discography to produce music like his, which is an aspect of human creativity that LLMs currently lack.
You can make a business as soon as you’re done listening to them all.
But I’m not allowed to remix them. That’s the point that’s being made
It can’t remix either so that’s not an issue
That’s the only thing it does.
no, it doesn’t.
woosh
One has to pay a very high cost to do this. These AI companies did not pay. Why do AI companies get a pass on copyrighted material that the rest of us are getting sued, imprisoned, and fined for accessing?
Lot of people flying in this thread to down vote people saying that these media companies live by a different set of rules than the rest of us without understanding that this AI model is basically a huge automated record scratching DJ that can only regurgitate things its heard before reassembled and presented as new. If any of us tried to do this same thing they’d sue our pants off for piracy and plagiarism. But when they do it it’s fine.
plagiarism isn’t a tort.
There’s nothing stopping you from going to youtube, listening to a bunch of hit country songs there, and using that inspiration to write a “hit country song about getting your balls caught in a screen door”. That music was free to access, and your ability to create derivative works is fully protected by copyright law.
So if that’s what the AI is doing, then it would be fully legal if it was a person. The question courts are trying to figure out is if AI should be treated like people when it comes to “learning” and creating derivative works.
I think there are good arguments to both sides of that issue. The big advantage of ruling against AI having those rights is that it means that record labels and other rights holders can get compensation for their content being used. The main disadvantage is that high cost barriers to training material will kill off open-source and small company AI, guaranteeing that generative AI is fully controlled by tech giant companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
I think the best legal outcome is one that attempts to protect both: companies and individuals below a certain revenue threshold (or other scale metrics) can freely train on the open web, but are required to track what was used for training. As they grow, there will be different tiers where they’re required to start paying for the content their model was trained on. Obviously this solution needs a lot of work before being a viable option, but I think something similar to this is the best way to both have competition in the AI space and make sure people get compensated.
Yea, I think only big media corporations would profit from such a copyright rule Average Joe’s creations will be scraped because he has no funding to prove and sue those big AI corporations
Actually, that music was based off of getting royalties and ad viewership. No one will pay for an ai to be exposed to an ad or pay royalties for an ai to hear a song. Or have an ai to hear a song for the chance of the ai buying merchandise or a concert ticket.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own for-profit product is illegal in every way except when AI does it. AI is not a person watching videos. AI is a product using others’ content as its bricks and mortar. Thousands of hours of work on a project you completed being used by someone else to turn sa profit, maybe even used in some way you vehemently disagree with, without giving you a dime is unethical and needs regulation from that perspective.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own productive work is allowed if you are making a fair use. There’s a very good argument that use such as training a model on a work would be a fair use under the current test; being a transformative use, that replicates practically no actual part of the original piece in the finished work, that (arguably) does not serve as a replacement for that specific piece in the market.
Fair use is the cornerstone of remix art, of fan art, of huge swathes of musical genres. What we are witnessing is the birth of a new technique based on remixing and unfortunately this time around people are convinced that fighting on the side of big copyright is somehow the good thing for artists.
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own for-profit product is illegal in every way except when AI does it.
No, actually its completely legal to consume content that was uploaded to the internet and then use it as inspiration to create your own works.
Algorithms don’t have “inspiration”.
What is “inspiration” in your opinion and how would that differ from machine learning algorithms?
Taking other people’s creative works to create your own for-profit product is illegal in every way except when AI does it.
wrong.
You’re literally on a piracy server. You know about the laws and how hard the corpos crack down on us. Why the fuck are you licking the boots now
i’m principled, so i know that copying content is good and stopping people from copying is bad.
you’re wrong on the facts, this has nothing to do with supporting corporations.
Sure, jan
Thousands of hours of work on a project you completed being used by someone else to turn a profit, maybe even used in some way you vehemently disagree with, without giving you a dime is
exactly how human culture progresses, and trying to stop it
is unethical and needs regulation from that perspective.
That’s covered by section 107 of the US copyright law, and is actually fine and protected as free use in most cases. As long as the work is a direct copy and instead changes the result to be something different.
All parody type music is protected in this way, whether it’s new lyrics to a song, or even something less “creative” like performing the lyrics of song A to the melody and style of song B.
It should be fully legal because it’s still a person doing it. Like Cory Doctrow said in this article:
Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it’s technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn’t exist, then you should support scraping at scale: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research
The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/
That’s all these models are, someone’s analysis of the training data in relation to each other, not the data itself. I feel like this is where most people get tripped up. Understanding how these things work makes it all obvious.
I think AI should be allowed ti use any available data, but it has to be made freely available e.g. by making it downloadable on huggingface
I think the solution is just that anything AI generated should be public domain.
That’s the current status quo.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. You’re absolutely correct (at least, in the US). And it seems to be based on pretty solid reasoning, so I could see a lot of other copyright offices following the same idea.
Source: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf (See header II. The Human Authorship Requirement)
TL;DR
the Office states that “to qualify as a work of ‘authorship’ a work must be created by a human being” and that it “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”
Yes. Uncopyrightable = public domain. Copyright is not the default
If you use a tool, let’s say photoshop, to make an image, should it be of public domain?
Even if the user effort here is just the prompt, it’s still a tool used by an user.Well, the AI doesn’t do all the work, you use public domain material (AI output) to create your own copyright protected product/art/thing etc.
All you have to do is put some human work into the creation. I guess the value of the result still correlates with the amount of human work one puts into a project.
If you roll a set of dice, do you own the number?
I don’t think it is a tool in the same sense that image editing software is.
But if for example you use a LLM to write an outline for something and you heavily edit it, then that’s transformative, and it’s owned by you.
The raw output isn’t yours, even though the prompt and final edited version are.
If you snap a photo of something, you own the photo (at least in the US).
There’s a solid argument that someone doing complex AI image generation has done way more to create the final product than someone snapping a quick pic with their phone.
One could also say that building a camera from first principles is a lot more work than entering a prompt in DALL-E, but using false equivalents isn’t going up get us very far.
I think a fairer comparison in that case would be the difficulty of building a camera vs the difficulty of building and programming an AI capable computer.
That doesn’t really make sense either way though, no on is building their camera/computer from raw materials and then arguing that gives them better intellectual rights.
Inspiration ≠ mathematically derived similarity.
These aren’t artists giving their own rendering, these are venture capitalists using shiny tools to steal other people hard work.
4 chords.
“4 chords” is a cool mashup but it’s not really a valid point in this conversation.
The songs in “4 chords” don’t use the same 4 chords, because they are higher and lower than that. So you might say they use the same progression, but that’s not true either, because they’re not always constantly in the same order. So the best you can say is “it’s possible to interpret pitch- and tempo-adjusted excerpts of these songs back-to-back”, which isn’t a very strong claim.
In fact there’s a lot of things separating the songs in “4 chords”; such as structure, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics, or production. Another fact is that it’s perfectly possible to use these four chords in a way that you’ve never heard before and would likely find bizarre – it’s a bit of meme, but limitation really can breed creativity.
This isn’t to defend the lack of creativity in the big music industry. But there’s more to it than just saying “4 chords” to imply all musicians do is follow an established grid.
I’m reminded of the Blue Man Group’s Complex Rock Tour. One of the major themes of the show is the contradiction in terms that is the “music industry.” That we tend to think of music as an artistic, ethereal thing that requires talent and inspiration…and yet we churn out pop music the same way we churn out cars and smart phones.
They’re not recreating music or selling albums. Someone called the musicians victims lol
Insane stuff
It’s pretty obvious if you get specific with the tags. Especially with older styles where there’s less available trianing data.
All creators should be compensated if what they created is used to make money at the very least.
If I make a song inspired by the sound of two artists, the lyrics of two other songs, and the voice of a few more, who gets the money?
I should think everybody should get a piece[Edit] Inspired actually changes everything. Inspired is all you. But if you’re using actual parts or pieces of somebody else’s work, then they should be compensated.
If you post stuff online for people to view it, don’t be surprised when computer see it too.
Posting doesn’t mean anyone can exploit it for commercial gain. Also a lot of music is pirated against the Creator’s wishes.
Yea, it’s the victim’s fault!
SVU over here
UMG can go to hell. Musicians already make almost next to nothing from song sales because the labels take so much.
Yeah but the fucking labels aren’t even being that resistant to AI. AI is robbing the labels a little, and the artists a lot. It’s like how in 1984 george orwell points out the proletariat and the middle class should be allies, but the middle class always installs itself as the upper class and leaves the proletariat behind. The labels are willing to ditch the artists so long as they get to stay in one of the upper two classes. So they’re willing to sell access to their back catalog and their lost masters to the AI companies so long as that pays them a little bit better than paying out for new artists to join the label. They’re the fucking overseers or the small whites in Haiti. They hurt the people they should be working with because they’re too short sighted to see what’s gonna happen once everything shakes out. And you’re over here rooting the AI robbery on because it will hurt the labels instead of realizing who it’s REALLY gonna hurt
Copyright doesn’t work like that.
The fact that you put online (e.g. in an online shop or, heck, even for free on your website) doesn’t imply anyone can use it for anything they please.
For example an mp3 on a indie musician website for making people know their music, doesn’t mean people can start making CD out of it and selling them
You may say that piracy exists but it is illegal and AI training is pretty much for profit piracy (using something outside the intended scope defined by the author for profit)
I think that the argument is that it’s not actually copying it and instead learning from it.
I feel like they really have to pay something. Maybe their argument is right and they shouldn’t pay full price given that if a human did the same thing to learn to make music, they also wouldn’t be billed in that way, given it’s openly available.
Maybe they are required to give a portion of profits back to the source materials creators?
The purpose of the copyright system is that someone should not be allowed to take your material and sell it to someone else passing it off as your own and make the profit thereby stealing the profit from you. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here but also at the same time it doesn’t seem like what they’re doing is right because they’re making profit off of somebody else’s work without paying anything.
It feels to me like the answer should be somewhere in the middle.
I certainly don’t have the answers though.
the argument is that it’s not actually copying it and instead learning from it.
It’s not learning, though.
Saying that these models have learnt the data they’ve been built with is akin to saying a zip file has learned the data it’s storing.
It’s not AI or anything remotely resembling AI, it’s just a new form of storage that’s very good at classifying the data that’s been stored in it and retrieving stored data that shares similar classification properties.
Its only difference from straight up copying are the classifications it builds. Whether that’s transformative enough to count as fair use, though, is open to debate.
If you make a software that takes random pictures off the web and randomly makes collages out of them, would it be fair use? Would those collages be copyrightable?
Whatever you answer should be your same answer for these models (I believe current copyright law would say that the software is copyrightable, but its works aren’t, and don’t fall under fair use, but I might be wrong).
A collage would be fair use, yes I believe that’s already been established but again I’m not like a copyright lawyer or anything like that. I’ll leave that for others to research and prove in the courtroom.
I would say that your first example, as it file is not really accurate but the collage may be more so. It’s a statistical model that calculates statistically what a thing should be. Is it learning? Maybe maybe not.
Sure, this company will burn for this, but Pandora’s box is wide open now.
I’m not condoning anything, but the original comment is unfortunately 100% true.
Why would the “AI” know about it and not just make that up though? But also, if companies can use everything on the internet as a “fair use” thing, then so should people. No more bullying of people making stuff you don’t like / agree with.
One of the four fair use factors is the portion of the copyrighted work that was taken. For a finding of fair use under this factor, the infringing work must only take the amount of copyrighted material needed for the infringing work’s purpose.
If they ripped every single file they have access to, there’s no way to be found as fair use under this factor. If they argue they were using a curated list of only the works they needed to develop their model it could be fair use, but admitting to taking every possible work in their entirety is a surefire way to fail a fair use defense.
Your interpretation of copyright law would be helped by reading this piece from an EFF lawyer who has actually litigated copyright cases in the past:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
But that’s not how model training works, it doesn’t simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less “listens” to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.
But you can’t just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).
Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that’s totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it’s not fair use is dubious.
Fair use is a legal doctrine relating to derivitave works based on copyrighted works. An AI model’s fair use determination would be judged by the same standards and all derivative works.
It doesn’t matter how they used the copyrighted works. This factor is about scale not intent.
There are four factors, and no single factor is determinative. But admitting their model uses as much training as possible makes their model less likely to be fair use.
If I as a human listened to every single song of a band from start to finish, then produced a similar song in the same vein (lyrics / music genre), it would be fair use.
So why would it stop being fair use if an AI does the same thing? Just that the AI can listen to every song of this band and a million other bands, combining them.
Because fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement. To use a fair use defense you have to admit your work is infringing, but argue that the infringement is justifiable.
Trying to defend the AI with fair use requires you to admit the AI itself is infringing, but justifiable, and by the doctrine of fair use, it is almost certainly not.
Only humans can hold copyrights. Your example would be a non-infringing work because it lacks direct copying. An AI doing the same would make an uncopyrightable work, with the AI itself being infinging if you tried the fair use defense.
Only humans can hold copyrights.
Yeah, no. Most copyrighted material is owned by companies, you don’t have to be a natural person to hold copyrights. And if a company can hold copyrights, you can also argue it can have fair use.
Companies are run by people. The human employees create copyrighted works that become the property of their employer by the terms of their contract. That’s how work for hire contracts work…
You would know this if you have ever worked in any creative field.
I work in a creative field. But companies are companies. If I work for a company and create something, it doesn’t belong to a natural person, it immediately goes over to the company.
Not the CEO or CTO or whoever is in management, it belongs to the legal entity. Isn’t this a company owning the work I just created? If the CEO dies, the company still owns it.
Imagine how many years of prison would get an individual if he admitted in court to pirate tens of millions of music files in order to make a profit
I mean Suno is being sued by the record labels right now for this. We will see how much they have to pay if they lose
I don’t know if corpos will allow such dangerous precedent since all mega corps are guilty of this
they’re right, they should absolutely be allowed to use and profit off of other peoples work that they spent decades learning and perfecting
(this is sarcasm in case you can’t tell they’re dumb as fuck for saying that shut this company down today pls)
If you created anything good or funny on suno, feel free to share it on !aimusic@sopuli.xyz
Fantastic! I love music and am currently training an AI of myself to determine whether or not I would like certain music, movies, tv shows, video games, business ideas, technolory, porn and art. In order to train my personal AI properly I need a copy of everything every human being and corporation has ever created so I can personally assess it.
This is great news for everyone!
Wait, not like that…
Just tried it out out of curiosity. It does a good job, but the music is still boring.
