Zoey Forbes, a U.K.-based attorney, in the Dial:

One hundred and forty years on from the Berne Convention, the basic principles of copyright remain the same, but GenAI poses a threat to authors different from anything that has existed before. Its novel technology is not only destabilizing what it means to reproduce works, but what it means to produce them.

This is a terrific and well-rounded exploration of copyright law and generative artificial intelligence from a non-U.S. perspective. That matters because the U.S. has a carve-out for “fair use” of copyrighted works, which is something generative A.I. companies are relying on for their defence of their unethical and maybe illegal practices. If it holds, it makes the rest of the world less desirable for A.I. development which, I fear, means it becomes a race to the bottom for all the countries that want a slice of this well-funded pie.

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Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

Suno is fighting several lawsuits, including one filed by UMG in which it makes the argument its use is sufficiently transformative. But people have been prosecuted for the mere act of downloading hundreds to thousands of songs. This line of argument suggests to me that, beyond some astronomical number of downloads, it becomes entirely legal because no single song will be of much consequence.

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Eryk Salvaggio, Tech Policy Press:

People are growing ever more frustrated by the intrusiveness of tech. This frustration feeds a cycle of fear that can be quickly dismissed, but doing so strikes me as either foolish or cynical. I am not a lawyer, but lately I have been in a lot of rooms with lawyers discussing people’s rights in the spheres of art and AI. One of the things that has come up recently is the challenge of translating oftentimes unfiltered feelings about AI into a legal framework.

[…]

I would never claim to speak to the concerns of everyone I’ve spoken with about AI, but I have made note of a certain set of themes. I understand these as three C’s for data participation: Context, Consent, and Control.

This is a thoughtful essay about what it means for creation to be public, and the imbalanced legal architecture covering appropriation and reuse. I bet many people feel this in their gut — everything is a remix, yet there are vast differences between how intellectual property law deals with individuals compared to businesses.

If I were creating music by hand which gave off the same vibes as another artist, I would be worried about a resulting lawsuit, even if I did not stray into the grey area of sampling. And I would have to obtain everything legally — if I downloaded a song off the back of a truck, so to speak, I would be at risk of yet more legal jeopardy, even if it was for research or commentary. Yet an A.I. company can scrape all the music that has ever been published to the web, and create a paid product that will reproduce any song or artist you might like without credit or compensation; they are arguing this is fair use.

This does not seem like a fair situation, and it is not one that will be remedied by making copyright more powerful. I appreciated Salvaggio’s more careful assessment.

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