AI firms sued over unlicensed use of music

A group of major record labels is suing two AI startups, alleging they wrongfully used popular artists’ work to train their systems to produce copyrighted music without their consent.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) — the trade group on behalf of labels including Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings and Warner Records — filed two copyright infringement cases against AI companies Suno and Uncharted Labs, the developer behind Udio, for training their AI models with the labels’ unlicensed sound recordings.

Udio is the company behind “BBL Drizzy,” the AI-generated song that went viral last month during the Kendrick Lamar and Drake spat. Udio was founded last year by former Google DeepMind researchers to make it “easy for anyone to create emotionally resonant music in an instant,” according to the company. In April, it raised US$10 million in funding.

Meanwhile, Suno raised US$125 million in funding last month. The platform, which allows users to create songs with only a few prompts, relies on OpenAI’s ChatGPT for lyrics and title development.

RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement that the lawsuits are “necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”

He added that the music community is already partnering and collaborating with “responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools” that put artists and songwriters in charge. In April, more than 200 artists, including Billie Eilish, Kacey Musgraves, J Balvin, Ja Rule, Jon Bon Jovi, The Jonas Brothers, Katy Perry, Miranda Lambert and more, signed an open letter organized by the non-profit Artist Rights Alliance calling on AI developers, technology companies, platforms and digital music services to “cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”

Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Suno states the company has over 10,000,000 users generating music files using the platform, bringing in about 2,000,000 streams.

“These digital music files have been released to the public — some already finding their way onto the major streaming services — and compete with the copyrighted sound recordings that enabled their creation; yet Suno sought no permission from and gives no credit or compensation to the human artists or other rightsholders whose works fueled their creation.” (SD-Agencies)

Words to Learn

相关词汇

【公然的】gōngrán de

blatant

very obvious and intentional, when this is a bad thing

【承认】 chéngrèn

credit

recognition 

一群唱片公司正在起诉两家人工智能初创公司，指控它们未经流行音乐人许可非法使用其作品来训练系统，制作受版权保护的音乐。

美国唱片业协会（RIAA）是代表索尼音乐娱乐、环球音乐集团和华纳唱片等公司的行业组织，该协会诉Suno公司和AI音乐创作平台Udio背后的Uncharted Labs公司侵权，指控它们使用唱片公司未经授权的版权音乐来训练人工智能模型。

有人利用Udio平台制作了神曲“BBL Drizzy”，这首由人工智能生成的歌在上个月肯德里克•拉马尔和德雷克的口水战中走红网络。前谷歌DeepMind研究人员去年创立了Udio，旨在“让普通人轻松快捷地创作能引起情感共鸣的音乐。”今年4月，该公司融资1000万美元。

与此同时，Suno上月也获得了1.25亿美元的融资。该平台让用户只需几句提示就能创作歌曲，歌词和标题的制作依赖于 OpenAI的ChatGPT。

RIAA首席执行官米奇•格莱泽尔在一份声明中说，这些诉讼是“必要手段，为了让大家遵守原则，负责任、合规合法地开发生成式人工智能系统；诉讼也是终止Suno和Udio 公然侵权行为的必要手段”。

他补充说，音乐界已经在与“负责任的开发者”合作，共同打造可持续的人工智能系统，让艺术家和词曲作者有主导权。

今年4月，比莉•艾利什、凯茜•玛丝格蕾芙丝、J•巴尔文、杰•鲁、乔恩•邦•乔维、乔纳斯兄弟、凯蒂•佩里、米兰达•兰伯特等200多位艺术家签署了一封由非营利组织“艺术家权利联盟”发起的公开信，呼吁人工智能开发者、技术公司、平台和数字音乐服务“停止使用人工智能侵犯和贬低人类艺术家的权利”。

与此同时，针对Suno的诉讼称，超过1千万名用户使用该平台生成音乐文件，带来了约200万次流媒体播放。

诉讼称：“这些数字音乐文件已经公开发布 —— 有些已进入主流的流媒体服务 —— 并与促成其创作、受版权保护的音乐形成竞争；然而，Suno公司没有征得艺术家本人或其他权利人的许可，也没有给予促成再创作品的原作权利人任何承认或补偿。”(Translated by Debra)