Comment by pier25
6 months ago
> buying, physically cutting up, physically digitizing books, and using them for training is fair use
So Suno would only really need to buy the physical albums and rip them to be able to generate music at an industrial scale?
Yes! Training and generation are fair use. You are free to train and generate whatever you want in your basement for whatever purpose you see fit. Build a music collection, go ham.
If the output from said model uses the voice of another person, for example, we already have a legal framework in place for determining if it is infringing on their rights, independent of AI.
Courts have heard cases of individual artists copying melodies, because melodies themselves are copyrightable: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2020/02/every-possible-melod...
Copyright law is a lot more nuanced than anyone seems to have the attention span for.
> Yes!
But Suno is definitely not training models in their basement for fun.
They are a private company selling music, using music made by humans to train their models, to replace human musicians and artists.
We'll see what the courts say but that doesn't sound like fair use.
My understanding is that Suno does not sell music, but instead makes a tool for musicians to generate music and sells access to this tool.
The law doesn't distinguish between basement and cloud – it's a service. You can sell access to the service without selling songs to consumers.
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If, as a human artist, I decide to train myself on the discography of a famous artist, then produce songs in his style and sell them for cheap so that others don't have to pay for the original artist, then I am sure it is fair use. It is done all the time.
Now, what if instead of training myself using real instruments, I train my AI and do the same. Is it different?
It is complicated, but there are many arguments in favor of fair use, probably more than they are against but as you say, let's the courts decide.
But in any case, piracy is illegal in every case. As a human, it is illegal for me to use pirate copies, whether it is for training myself as a musician, for training my AI, or for simply listening.
> Copyright law is a lot more nuanced than anyone seems to have the attention span for.
Copyright is probably the wrong body of law for regulating AI companies.
If it's fair use to train a model, that doesn't necessarily imply that the model can be legally used to generate anything.
I've been reading a bit more about this. The training might not be considered fair use if it's not considered transformative.
Claude has been considered transformative given it's not really meant to generate books but Suno or Midjourney are absolutely in another category.
really? so Suno or Midjourney can produce literal copies of works they were trained on?
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Well there was that legal company who trained an LLM on their oppositions legal documents and then generated their own. I dont think inputs or outputs were ruled legal in that regard.
But as long as the model isnt outputting infringing works theres not really any issue there either.
this is funny and potentially accurate
Not sure we can infer that (or anything) about Suno from this ruling. The judge here said that Anthropic's usage was extremely transformative. Would Suno's also be considered that way?
Anthropic doesn't take books and use them to train a model that is intended to generate new books. (Perhaps it could do that, to some extent, but that's no its [sole] purpose.)
But Suno would be taking music to train a model in order to generate new music. Is that transformative enough? We don't know what a judge thinks, at least not yet.
Only if the physical albums don't have copy protection, otherwise you're circumenventing it and that's illegal. Or is it, against the right to private copy? If anything, AI at least shows that all of the existing copyright laws are utter bullshit made to make Disney happy.
Do keep in mind though: this is only for the wealthy. They're still going to send the Pinkertons at your house if you dare copy a Blu-ray.
No, because they can just play the album for the AI to learn. AI training can be set up to exploit the analog hole. Same with images/movies
> They're still going to send the Pinkertons at your house if you dare copy a Blu-ray.
Hey woah now, that's a Hasbro play, not a Disney one.
With some minor exceptions, CDs don't have copy protection.
Minor exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Same how it works in the Netherlands.
Yes.
Actually it remains to be seen.
If you read the ruling, training was considered fair use in part because Claude is not a book generation tool. Hence it was deemed transformative. Definitely not what Suno and Udio are doing.
So not only did they pirate works but they destroyed possibly collectible physical copies too. Kafkaesque.
Google set the precedent for this with an even less transformative use case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....