Another example: the people driving in the opposite direction right before 4th of July!
Another example: the people driving in the opposite direction right before 4th of July!
I agree more states should go this, but radical changes in laws aren’t so unusual. For example, marijuana possession can be legal in one state and a felony five minutes away.
The guy responsible for killing Roe v Wade literally took credit for it on TV yesterday.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
Thanks to the Supreme Court, that’s how
But the training data does contain songs, and they need to pay for those.
Courts have found that scraping data from a public website is legal, because data is not protected by copyright. But copying protected works without permission is generally illegal, it doesn’t matter if you use a scraper.
If the defendants in this case admit using RIAA works, then they will probably try to argue fair use. At that point their product will become relevant, including its commercial nature. This will weigh against them, because their songs directly compete against RIAA songs. In fact, that’s why artists who include samples in their work usually obtain permission first.
This is the basis for the RIAA claims, which sure sounds like piracy:
On information and belief, similar to other generative AI audio models, Suno trains its AI model to produce audio output by generally taking the following steps: a. Suno first copies massive numbers of sound recordings, including by “scraping” (i.e., copying or downloading) them from digital sources. This vast collection of information forms the input, or “corpus,” upon which the Suno AI model is trained.
There is no evidence the AI devs bought any music, for any use. Quite the opposite:
Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at the venture capital firm Matrix Partners, explained that his firm invested in the company with full knowledge that Suno might get sued by copyright owners, which he understood as “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company.” Rodriguez pulled the curtain back further when he added that “honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.” By “constraints,” Rodriguez was, of course, referring to the need to adhere to ordinary copyright rules and seek permission from rightsholders to copy and use their works.
I don’t think this is frivolous. If you publish a song that includes part of my song, that’s good evidence that you copied my song.
This isn’t a prosecution, and nobody is alleging a crime. This is a civil lawsuit.
In a civil lawsuit, the standard of evidence is much different. You do not have to “prove” things beyond a reasonable doubt like in a criminal trial. The jury is instructed to weigh the evidence like a balance, and whichever side has the best evidence wins. Even if it’s only a small difference that only slightly favors one side, they win.
That’s why it’s so important to have evidence that counters whatever the other side claims. You are bound to lose if your opponents are the only ones offering evidence on their side of the balance.
Training starts with storing a copy of training data.
That’s circumstantial evidence. Which will always beat zero evidence.
If you don’t keep logs, and someone has evidence you did something wrong, then there won’t be any opposing evidence that you were in the right. So the jury will start out siding against you, and you won’t have any way to win them back.
In fact if a judge thinks you didn’t keep logs because you were afraid they would incriminate you, then they will tell the jury to consider the lack of logs as further evidence against you.
Then how can they say they didn’t use the songs in question?
I think a common misconception of these lawsuits is that the AI output is an issue. It isn’t. It doesn’t matter what the generative AI generates. The AI developers, not the AIs, are the problem.
Let’s go back to your Vanilla Ice example. Suppose Vanilla Ice is found to have downloaded a massive collection of mp3s from The Pirate Bay. He is sued by the RIAA, just like Napster users were sued years ago.
In court, he explains that what he did is legal because his music doesn’t sample from his mp3 collection at all. And he loses, because the RIAA doesn’t care what he did after he pirated mp3s. Pirating them, by itself, is illegal.
And that’s what’s going on here. The RIAA isn’t arguing that the AI output is illegal. They are arguing that the AI output is basically a snitch: it’s telling the RIAA that the developers must have pirated a bunch of mp3s.
In other words, artists like Vanilla Ice have to pay for their mp3s like everyone else. And so do software developers.
Of course there are other ways to create similar notes.
But now the AI developers will have to testify under oath that they did not use Johnny B Goode, and identify the soundalike song they used that is not among the millions of other IPs held by the RIAA.
You can prove it through discovery, ie force the AI developers to reveal all the songs they used to train their AI.
I don’t know what is going on here. On the one hand, I don’t trust Assange. On the other hand, I really don’t trust the Trump DoJ. Especially since they indicted Assange after the Obama DoJ concluded he hadn’t broken the law.
A trial would have been interesting.
I didn’t say I think he is guilty. But the charges against him aren’t what everyone seems to think.
Australia, like the US and other countries, does not generally shield suspected criminals from prosecution.
And that’s regardless of whether the person is actually guilty. Just ask Amanda Knox.
It is federalized. Marijuana is illegal at the federal level.
But one of the advantages of the split between state and federal laws is that states can experiment with decriminalization.