Comment by freejazz

6 months ago

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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freejazz

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conradev  6 months ago

When you use a DAW to recreate a favorite song for learning, should the DAW show a warning that you’re infringing on a copyrighted melody? Should it let you make it? Export it? You promise the DAW it’s for personal use? It’s only a matter of time until this stuff is in DAWs.

When a general computer using agent recreates songs in Logic Pro in high fidelity, then what?

It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans Use things generally and ask them to be Fair.

Or we can go in the direction of movies and TV where screenshots of protected content show up blank on my iPhone. Just in case someone wanted to, god forbid, clip the show.

  • freejazz  6 months ago

    I don't think anyone could reasonably characterize a DAW as a tool designed to infringe copyrights with so I don't think there is an issue. The fact that none of the labels have ever sued DAWs for this reason should be an intuition for you on this matter.

    >It’s called Fair Use for a reason – we let humans Use things generally and ask them to be Fair.

    So exhausted with people who come to these threads and try to discuss legal issues by only paying lip service to the words and not their meanings, let alone the actual law that they seem to want to debate. Then they go even further and turn it into some grand political statement, or hypothesize why copyright shouldn't exist at all. But there is absolutely no jurisprudence that would indicate a DAW is the kind of tool I described. I understand you came up with an argument in your head why it could be, but I'm letting you know that in the law, it's not what would be considered a reasonable argument and it would go nowhere.

    DAWs are tools made to create music, generally. They do not contain banks of copyrighted materials to which the user ultimately pulls the copying "trigger" (that's the system I described).

    I hope that helps.

    • ricardobeat  6 months ago

      It’s easy to fall back to known concepts to frame new things, but that is not accurate. LLMs do not hold “banks of copyrighted materials”, though they can recreate popular bits, in the same way a human can recall and hum the X Files theme but doesn’t actually have a recording of it in their brain. They are just a lot better at it.

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    • conradev  6 months ago 

        DAWs are tools made to create music, generally. They do not contain banks of copyrighted materials to which the user ultimately pulls the copying "trigger" (that's the system I described).

      You are quite literally describing sample packs (which are copyrighted). The only difference is that they figured out a fair licensing scheme for those. Is my understanding of copyright law wrong or poor here?

      Imagine we invented some new hypothetical technology to take all of the sample packs in the world as input and produce new sample packs that humans haven't thought of before. Should we figure out how to license those packs fairly or pretend we never invented it?

      Only so many artists have the patience to make each drum from scratch.

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