[pier25]

> 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.

[conradev]

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.

[pier25]

That's like arguing that a restaurant doesn't sell food because it sells the service of cooking it.

[tekknik]

Look up what a cloud kitchen is.

[conradev]

The restaurant is not responsible for E. coli if it’s found, are they? Just cooking it out of the food

Suno can’t prevent humans from copying other humans, it can only make sure that the direct output of its system isn’t infringing.

[Greed]

You may be reaching the limits of the metaphor here, but restaurants are absolutely responsible for the e coli if it's found in significant quantities whether it's in the initial ingredients or the cooked end product. A restaurant is required to vet its suppliers and ensure food safety protocols throughout the entire process with several independent checks at many points, and is ultimately directly responsible if a customer sues. A restaurant does not get to cook bad ingredients well and then point at the supplier. They will find themselves shut down immediately, andpermanently if they do not resolve the situation.

In this context, this would be the equivalent of Suno explicitly placing stop points throughout the training, tokenization, and generation processes to verify that there was absolutely no chance of it generating copyrighted material through some kind of clean room reconstruction test. They would also need those tests to be audited at random by a third party governing body. Obviously they are not doing this, so the metaphor definitely does not track here.

[conradev]

The problem here is there is no “test” that is known to work here other than checking for direct infringement, which they have a responsibility to do (as they don’t have a license to the originals).

Anything remotely beyond that and we have teams of humans adjudicating specific cases: https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/currentcases

[Greed]

I mean, I was speaking more to the breakdown of the metaphor than the argument itself but if that's your response then it tells me that there is no reasonable way that Suno can ever really claim fair-use. I can't imagine being one of the artists whose material Suno has trained on and being told: "We have no idea when or if it will generate copyrighted content, or how to test for it. But we will continue to use your material and arbitrate on a case-by-case basis as it is brought to our attention." That sounds insane.

Surely, for Suno to claim fair usage and be given free reign to build a commercial business off of literally anyone's original works then the bare minimum bar for allowing that usage would be: make a satisfactory test to prove that you're always doing something transformative and original, within practical limits.

[immibis]

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.

[conradev]

I can’t buy the music you generate using Suno, though, unless you take action to list it somewhere for sale.

[immibis]

You also can't buy a massage I receive. Does that mean I was sold access to a massage generation tool instead of a massage?

[conradev]

Yes! You were sold a service and not a good, and you cannot copyright the act of the massage itself.

[freejazz]

That's because a massage is not a copyrightable expression (dance is), not because it's sold as a service.

[musicale]

We don't infringe - we just sell a service that enables users to create infringing works on demand.

[freejazz]

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"

[conradev]

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]

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]

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.

[freejazz]

I didn't describe an LLM. Read the thread. I decsribed a particular type of service or machine where the maker would liable as a contributory infringer without directly infringing. That's all. Read my post, I even said "Not saying this is exactly what Suno is doing"

Someone responded and said "Why not DAWs, then?" The answer is because a DAW is not that kind of service or machine.

>t’s easy to fall back to known concepts to frame new things, but that is not accurate. LLMs do not hold a “banks of copyrighted materials”,

As an aside. That's clearly not true in some models given that in a number of the cases, the plaintiffs can recreate their works verbatim.

[conradev]

  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.

[freejazz]

Sure, except that sample packs are original materials by their author (as opposed to whatever Suno contains, which is other people's work). And yes, I imagine that sample packs come with a license to use the samples commercially. Otherwise there would be no market for them. I just did some brief searching and it looks like some sample packs even require royalty kick-backs. So, yeah.

[conradev]

I come to copyright threads because I think Section 1201 of the DMCA is in direct violation of the Hacker Manifesto.

[dragonwriter]

I’m more concerned with the fact that it's, if not a direct violation, an intentional end run around the First Amendment (Fair Use, while enshrined in statute now, being initially established as a limitation on the copyright power derived from the First Amendment.)

[freejazz]

I don't think 1201 is invoked in this case and, as a copyright attorney, I don't really ever see it invoked anyway. I understand you have an axe to grind, but I don't see how your approach makes sense. Further, I'm not sure what obligation the law as to the "Hacker Manifesto" that it should be of any consequence anyway. All sorts of laws run against the manifesto. So what? The point of the manifesto wasn't to behave lawfully anyway, right? It's also my experience that so much of this copyright discourse is centered on incorrect assumptions about copyright that these axe-grinding missions are really counterproductive. I don't find it very productive to engage with posters who assume the conclusion that something is wrong and do not regard any of the related details or nuance.

[johnnyanmac]

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.

[pyman]

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?

[markhahn]

why are you saying "memorize"? are people training AIs to regurgitate exact copies? if so, that's just copying. if they return something that is not a literal copy of the whole work, then there is established caselaw about how much is permitted. some clearly is, but not entire works.

when you buy a book, you are not acceding to a license to only ever read it with human eyes, forbearing to memorize it, never to quote it, never to be inspired by it.

[mwarkentin]

> Specifically, the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time. (I’ll unpack how this was measured in the next section.)

> Interestingly, Llama 1 65B, a similar-sized model released in February 2023, had memorized only 4.4 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This suggests that despite the potential legal liability, Meta did not do much to prevent memorization as it trained Llama 3. At least for this book, the problem got much worse between Llama 1 and Llama 3.

> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was one of dozens of books tested by the researchers. They found that Llama 3.1 70B was far more likely to reproduce popular books—such as The Hobbit and George Orwell’s 1984—than obscure ones. And for most books, Llama 3.1 70B memorized more than any of the other models.

[pyman]

You are comparing AI to humans, but they're not the same. Humans don't memorise millions of copyrighted work and spit out similar content. AI does that.

Memorising isn't wrong but when machines memorise at scale and the people behind the original work get nothing, it raises big ethical questions.

The law hasn't caught up.

[bongodongobob]

As a former musician, yes, we do. Any above average musician can play "Riders on the Storm" in the style of Johnny Cash, or Green Day, or Nirvana, etc. Successful above average musicians usually have almost encyclopedic knowledge of artists and albums at least in their favorite genre. This is how all art is made. Some artists will be more honest about this than others.

[pyman]

Again, you are comparing machines with humans. We're built for depth, not scale. Machines are built for scale, not depth.

I also play the guitar, and it took me 10 years to learn 30 or 40 songs. So I don't see how anyone can learn 7 million songs in a couple of minutes.

[immibis]

And those bands can successfully sue you for that. Especially if you sell it for money. Double especially if your sales of their songs displace them in the market.

[belorn]

The wast majority of piracy are not literal copies. Movies and music get constantly transformed into different sizes and scales, with the majority using lossy transformations that changes the work. A movie taken as raw format and transformed into 144p has far less than 1% of the original work, and is barely recognizable. Copyright law seems to recognize that as infringement.

Most AI seems much better at reproducing a semi-identical copies of an original work than existing video/audio encoders.

[GuB-42]

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.