Music publishers sue happy in the face of any new technological development? You don't say.
If an intern gives you some song lyrics on demand, do they sue the parents?
Do we develop all future A.I. Technology only when it can completely eschew copyrighted material from their comprehension?
"I am sorry, I'm not allowed to refer to the brand name you are brandishing. Please buy our brand allowance package #35 for any action or communication regarding this brand content. "
I dream of a future when we think of the benefit of humanity over the maintenance of our owners' authoritarian control.
If an intern gives you some song lyrics on demand, do they sue the parents?
Uh--- what? That analogy makes no sense. AI is trained off actual lyrics, which is why companies who create these models are at risk (they don't own the data they're feeding into the model.)
Also your comment is completely mixing Trademark and Copyright examples. It has nothing to do with brand names and everything to do with intellectual property.
In reality people learn how to write lyrics because they listen to songs. Nobody writes a song without listening to thousands of them and many human written songs are really similar to each other. Otherwise the music industry wouldn’t be littered with lawsuits. I don’t really see the difference.
AI is trained off actual lyrics, which is why companies who create these models are at risk (they don’t own the data they’re feeding into the model.)
Nobody is "at risk" of anything here. You don't have to own data to use data, just like you're not liable for the content of an Internet page because it was downloaded to your browser's cache.
Everybody who agrees with these lawsuits have a severe misunderstanding of how LLMs and other AI models work. They are large matrices of weights and numbers, not copies of the data they consume. The entire Stable Diffusion model is a 4GB file, trained from billions of images. It's impossible to "copy" petabytes of images and somehow end up with a few gigabytes of numbers. The transformation is a lossy process, and its result does not fit the definition of copyright.
I conflate these things because they come from the same intentional source. I associate the copywrite chasing lawyers with the brands that own them, it is just a more generalized example.
Also an intern who can give you a songs lyrics are trained on that data. Any effectively advanced future system is largely the same, unless it is just accessing a database or index, like web searching.
Copyright itself is already a terrible mess that largely serves brands who can afford lawyers to harass or contest infringements. Especially apparent after companies like Disney have all but murdered the public domain as a concept. See the mickey mouse protection act, as well as other related legislation.
This snowballs into an economy where the Disney company, and similarly benefited brands can hold on to ancient copyrights, and use their standing value to own and control the development and markets of new intellectual properties.
Now, a neuralnet trained on copywritten material can reference that memory, at least as accurately as an intern pulling from memory, unless they are accessing a database to pull the information. To me, sueing on that bases ultimately follows the logic that would dictate we have copywritten material removed from our own stochastic memory, as we have now ensured high dimensional informational storage is a form of copywrite infringement if anyone instigated the effort to draw on that information.
Ultimately, I believe our current system of copywrite is entirely incompatible with future technologies, and could lead to some scary arguments and actions from the overbearing oligarchy. To argue in favour of these actions is to argue never to let artificial intelligence learn as humans do. Given our need for this technology to survive the near future as a species, or at least minimize the excessive human suffering, I think the ultimate cost of pandering to these companies may be indescribably horrid.
Music publishers have historically been a serious force in copyright protection, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. They’d put in far more of a legal battle than artists, writers, coders or other people whose work has been used in training models.
I don't understand why they should give a shit. I mean, I know it's because they're litigious pricks, but there's no real reason for them to care. Nobody sits around reading AI-generated lyrics instead of listening to actual music.
Nothing quite like the music publishers having a temper tantrum when an AI is able to give publicly available online lyrics to a song just because they aren't making any form of money from that AI.
I side with Anthropic on this one since I don't view sharing lyrics in any way, shape, or form a breach of copyright so long as it's done in a non-commercial way. And yes I also view Claude just listing them as non-commercial, even if you are on the payed plan.
Fuck the music industry in this case. It's no wonder the bigwigs in the industry probably only land one night stands, gold diggers, and hookers given their greed and one nanometer beaters.
Hmmm. I dont exactly want to cheer on the music publishing copyright industry, but AI infringing on creative spaces is certainly an issue especially when its trained using someones data without their consent.
Im surprised they arent chomping at the bit to train these AIs so that they can use the end result to give us AI driven artists, but I guess their knee jerk reaction to do a dcma takedown is too strong.
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The lawsuit said Anthropic violates the publishers’ rights through its use of lyrics from at least 500 songs ranging from the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk and Beyoncé’s Halo.
The lawsuit accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers’ copyrights by copying their lyrics without permission as part of the “massive amounts of text” that it scrapes from the internet to train Claude to respond to human prompts.
The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the lyrics by request, and in response to “a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers’ lyrics”, including “requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter”.
For example, the lawsuit said that Claude will provide relevant lyrics from Don McLean’s American Pie when asked to write a song about the death of the rock pioneer Buddy Holly.
Many copyright owners including authors and visual artists have sued tech companies such as Meta Platforms and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over the use of their work to train generative-AI systems.
The music publishers’ lawsuit appears to be the first case over AI’s use of song lyrics and the first against Anthropic, which has drawn financial backing from Google, Amazon and $500m from the former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.