[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.

[conradev]

I'm genuinely trying to engage and I'm curious where my preconceptions are "fundamentally wrong" versus not understanding "what makes a dance copyrightable where a massage is not".

Where are you on the continuum? Regarding training an AI model in my basement on purchased music, do you think I should:

- Not be allowed to train it

- Not be allowed to run it

- Not be allowed to share outputs from it anywhere

- Not be allowed to share outputs from it publicly

- Not be allowed to share outputs from it commercially

- Not be allowed to share its weights for others to run it

Or are you primarily focused on the current legal precedent?

[freejazz]

>I'm genuinely trying to engage and I'm curious where my preconceptions are

Sure, I appreciate that. My point is that none of this has anything to do with § 1201 so there's really no point in coming to this with a kind of incredulity that is counterproductive stemming from your own beliefs about that one particular law. Not saying that is necessarily what you are doing, but I see that kind of approach so frequently here. A lot of not really knowing what a copyright protects, its limits, how they are adjudicated, etc, but then a lot of confidence about how it is all just wrong for society.

For starters, to answer your first question. Copyright protects creative artistic expressions. What is covered is defined in the copyright statute, and the list does not include massages. So, that would be the reason why a massage is not protected. Why is "massage" on that list? Probably because no one can reasonably consider a massage a creative artistic expression. Choreography is the art in which that form of expression exists and would be covered. Could you copyright a dance that included massage movements? Yeah, sure. Could you copyright a dance that consisted entirely of massage movements. Sure. Could you use that copyright to prevent massage therapists from "performing" massages? No.

That's obviously a very surface level take and what is actually protected in a copyright isn't necessarily the entirety of the work but the aspects of it that original expressions. There are other limitations too, like something being de minimis. You can't copyright "the sky was blue" (Scarlett Begonias, the Grateful Dead) and actually prohibit others from using the phrase. That phrase alone is too small (among other things). The Grateful Dead do have a copyright to the entirety of the lyrics to Scarlett Begonias and can control various kinds of uses of the the lyrics.

>Or are you primarily focused on the current legal precedent?

All litigators are focused on current legal precedent. You cannot make arguments for how things should be without regard for how things are as that is the fundamental basis for what should be changed and why.

>Where are you on the continuum? Regarding training an AI model in my basement on purchased music, do you think I should:

Personally, I find AI abhorrent. I think its wrong for it to be trained without any compensation to the authors of the works used in the training, and I think it's wrong for the output to be commercialized to the benefit of the owner of the model without any compensation to the authors of the works used in generating the outputs.