Comment by conradev
6 months ago
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.
That's like arguing that a restaurant doesn't sell food because it sells the service of cooking it.
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They charge you by the amount of music you get from them. That's selling music. Selling a tool would be if they charge you once, you download the tool, and you can use it on your computer to generate as much music as you want to pay electricity for.
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We don't infringe - we just sell a service that enables users to create infringing works on demand.
Sure, but if you are just essentially making a copyright infringement tool, and then selling it to people so they can use it to infringe, and then they go and use it to infringe, you're a contributory infringer. Not saying this is exactly what Suno is doing, but just pointing out that you can be an infringer without "selling songs to consumers"
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That doesn't seem to track in my mind. So you can't sell music but you can sell 10 second snippets of music you pirated? It doesn't math out.
But i guess I'm not surprised that 2025 has little respect for artists.
What does "fair use" even mean in a world where models can memorise and remix every book and song ever written? Are we erasing ownership?
The problem is, copyright law wasn't written for machines. It was written for humans who create things.
In the case of songs (or books, paintings, etc), only humans and companies can legally own copyright, a machine can't. If an AI-powered tool generates a song, there’s no author in the legal sense, unless the person using the tool claims authorship by saying they operated the tool.
So we're stuck in a grey zone: the input is human, the output is AI generated, and the law doesn't know what to do with that.
For me the real debate is: Do we need new rules for non-human creation?
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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.