[Terr_]

Others have mentioned the "if the AI has those rights then it's also slavery" angle, but I think there's also a much less-dramatic argument...

Imagine that Acme Music hires large sweatshops of workers, who are tasked with listening to trending (copyrighted) songs and then go through grueling practice to sing and play near-perfect performances of those songs, delivered to any customer who asks for one.

That business model is still copyright infringement! It remains so no matter how much you de-automate by having human-brains replace machines at the same tedious tasks.

P.S.: Kind of like the inverse of patents, where "$task, but this time with a computer" is not automatically a new patent-able thing.

[williamcotton]

I work in copyright law.

Style is not subject to copyright, only expression. If there are unique lyrics and unique melodies under two bars then there is no copyright infringement.

A song that sounds like other pop songs is basically the very nature of pop music.

Pick a genre, for example reggae, and you’ll find a lot of perfectly legal songs that are almost indistinguishable aside from the musicians who are playing the music.

[Terr_]

> Style is not subject to copyright, only expression.

In this case you can assume Acme Music is making purposeful performances/impersonations of the original songs/artists, because the goal of the scenario is to show that "but I used a human brain to do it" isn't a magical get-out-of-infringement-free card.

Illustrating the boundaries of fair-use or transformative works is... Well, a somewhat-separate issue that would need a different kind of scenario.

[williamcotton]

Unless I’m shown concrete examples of what constitutes this kind of purposeful impersonation I’m unsure what is being discussed. I take your explanation to mean that any company that decided to start writing, producing and distributing reggae music would fall under this description.

Again, I am honestly confused by what is meant in this thread!

[Terr_]

A paraphrased recap:

1. Conasg: Taking huge amounts of copyrighted material without consent and selling access to it seems illegal.

2. Intrasight: Humans learn from copyrighted material all the time, and indirectly profit from it, so why can't the AI?

3. Me: Some of the stuff the software is being used to do would still copyright infringement even if you had teams of humans (inefficiently) doing it instead.

[williamcotton]

But what is that “some of the stuff”? I can’t think of any examples unless they are using large sections of melody and lyrics!

There literally are teams of people paid to deliver reggae music to people. Or pop music. I’m not well versed enough in trap music but it all sounds like the same autotuned vocals over a high-hat heavy percussive back track! It may be derivative and worthy of criticism, but only in an artistic manner. It is not derivative in a legal manner.

[Terr_]

> But what is that “some of the stuff”?

If you work in copyright law, why ask random internet-commenters? The allegations and arguments are the legal filing [0], such as:

> [4] Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim [...]

> [5] Defendants also [...] generate responses that contain verbatim excerpts and detailed summaries of Times articles that are significantly longer and more detailed than those returned by traditional search engines. By providing Times content without The Times’s permission or authorization, Defendants’ tools undermine and damage The Times’s relationship with its readers and deprive The Times of subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.

> [6] [T]here is nothing “transformative” about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it. Because the outputs of Defendants’ GenAI models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use.

[0] 1:23-cv-11195 - https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...

[pas]

getting inspired by visual art is more ok than its audio counterpart. mostly because audio is lower-dimensional somehow (melodies, riffs, sampling, beats, things are either recognizable or not at all.. well, not entirely, but in practice there are seemingly not that many things in this grey area, even when bands cite inspiration, the influence is sometimes not noticeable), of course maybe it's just a yet to be explored niche.

whereas visually copying style somehow is more possible and ok

[williamcotton]

As a musician, I can tell you that I can instantly hear a chord progression in any song and find loads of prior art.

But we’re really talking about style. Think reggae, isn’t it immediately obvious what style of music you’re listening to?

[pas]

Indeed, but and to me it seems there are "fewer" styles currently in music than in visual arts. (Even though I spend a lot more time listening to music than looking at visual art, even including movies/series.)

Of course this is a super bad n=1 qualitative study with very bad response coding, but maybe this is simply because I haven't spent enough time with musical style copying LLMs (if there are any), and only spent about a minute listening to that forever death metal youtube AI channel.