The AI developers Suno and Udio have responded to the lawsuit filed by several music publishers for copyright infringement in the USA. In an initial statement, both companies admitted to having trained their AI with copyrighted material. The US magazine Billboard quotes the companies said they had used “essentially all music files of reasonable quality available on the open Internet” for training. So far, the companies have not released any details about their training material in view of possible copyright infringements.
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The defense strategy of the two companies focuses on a special case in US copyright law: the so-called Fair Use IndexThis allows the use of protected material, for example for quoting, for research or for certain non-commercial purposes. When this is the case is often at the discretion of the courts. There are numerous rulings on when the appeal to “fair use” was legal and when it was not.
After the music publishers filed suit in June, Suno and Udio hired the same law firm, Latham & Watkins, to develop a joint defense strategy. The firm had already represented other AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, against lawsuits filed by various authors and the New York Times, reports the US magazine Billboard.
Impact on Europe
The eagerly awaited proceedings could also have an impact on Suno and Udio’s online offerings in Europe, where the AI Regulation has been in force since the beginning of August. This is because European copyright law does not recognize “fair use” as in the USA. In this country, the use of digital content for training AI models is §44b Copyright Act permitted as long as the author has not formulated a machine-readable reservation. There is currently a dispute in the courts as to what is and what is not understood by a “machine-readable reservation”.
However, in the case of music recordings, in addition to the copyright of the lyricists and composers, there is also ancillary copyright law. This protects, among other things, the musicians and technicians involved in the recording. Unlike copyright law, ancillary copyright law does not provide any exceptions for the use of recordings for AI training.
Experts expect that the proceedings in the USA could take years. European publishers and AI developers will be watching this very closely. Due to the different legal situation, it is quite possible that the case law here will ultimately turn out differently than in the “land of unlimited opportunities”.
(hag)
