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Universal Music Asks Streaming Services to Block AI Access to Its Songs
- _spduchamp 4y agoAt least until they setup their own AI music division, which they will totally do.
- lukeh 4y agoI’ll trust the majors to compensate rightsholders more than I’d trust tech bros.
- jacknews 4y agodefine 'rightsholders' Oh right, in most cases, it's actually the majors themselves. lol
- lukeh 4y agoI’m signed to Universal and I own my masters. Substitute artist for rightsholder if you prefer.
- jacknews 4y agoGood for you, but it's definitely not always the case. What's your take on AI training? To me, there's this new thing in the world. Are you going to try and stop it (unlikely), drop out (barely possible in a networked world), or try to make it work for you?
- lukeh 4y agoA good summary of the available options :) I simply don't know at this point.
- InCityDreams 4y ago>the majors to compensate rightsholders Ie themselves.
- mtillman 4y agoReminds me of Jamie Dimon telling congress that BTC was a scam and should be banned while paying an entire team of people to work on a BTC play for customers.
- garyfirestorm 4y agofiduciary duty /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- soylentcola 4y agoRight? How much of these labels' music is focus grouped? Or from performers signed by scouts looking for stuff that sounds like what's already selling? Or tweaked and sweetened with software to optimize based on play statistics? It's not that they have a problem with derivative work. It's a huge part of their catalog. They'd just rather train software on their digital assets and use it to further optimize their own product. Why would they want to help others do the same? I doubt popular music fans are going to consciously prefer "JamBot69" over "Band of Hot and Interesting People", but will they know if the latter had their songs penned or "improved" by the former?
- adamwong246 4y agoWe are waking up to the fact that these AIs are really more like juicers- they extract the "good stuff" ie replicable patterns, after which the original data is no longer needed. All the free stuff we put onto the web is what make GPTs so smart. So of course the media titans will move to block the juicing of their sweet sweet IPs.
- frumper 4y agoSounds similar to how google squeezes certain information out of a website to display so you don't need to bother visiting the actual website.
- anoncow 4y agoNew legal lessons from the age of AI. I wonder if we will start with the judges ruling that AI originated music can be copyrighted or not and whether AI trained on copyrighted music has to attribute its creations (to what?).
- bushbaba 4y agoif generative ai needs to attribute its music, so will musicians need to attribute their creations to past artists they studied and listened to.
- EamonnMR 4y agoYou need to obtain the rights to samples you use, why should this be any different?
- phonescreen_man 4y agoGenerative music is not using samples - just as a musician who learns a song on guitar, say wonderwall and then writes a hey there Delilah is not sampling.
- jrajav 4y agoThe fact that you need to obtain the rights to samples you use has never been about any meaningful or harmful form of 'stealing' in the slightest. It was about harming hip hop and those who created it. Sampling and interpolation is a key part of many forms of music, and is a beautiful craft in and of itself. Restricting it from the outside for reasons of profit (usually completely detached from either end of the actual artistry) has never protected anyone's IP in a way that preserves and advances the art form. It 100% holds the art form back, and does nothing else of merit.
- anoncow 4y agoLike we don’t need a (sample priced) license to listen to songs, AI should be able to use regular music subscriptions to listen to music and create new music. This may eventually result in regular music subscriptions being priced closer to sample pricing.
- hospitalJail 4y agoI know this is all about self preservation, but gosh I hate hindering progress. Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable. These are just roadblocks that are bad for everyone but the extreme minority. Even if one company/country bans it, in 10 years, it won't matter.
- asjdflakjsdf 4y agoI am seeing this sentiment so often online at the minute that it seems as though nobody has learned anything about DRM over the past 20 years. So many threads on reddit calling Italy "backwards" for protecting citizens data, and now people on HN expecting companies to give everything away for free because of the outcome is "inevitable"! There are a bunch of for-profit American AI companies. Why on Earth would another for-profit company, especially one based in another country, be ok with other people making money from their content. They can either look at developing their own AI platform, or build deals with the existing AI companies. It would be just plain stupid to give it all away for free, or any price that isn't determined by themselves.
- Analemma_ 4y agoBecause (at least in America) generative AI is an obvious transformative case allowable under Fair Use, and even if courts rule otherwise, like Sci-Hub it's such an obvious net positive for humanity that it's ethical to use even in the face of IP cops demanding you stop.
- JohnFen 4y ago> it's such an obvious net positive for humanity I think that's nowhere near obvious. But we will see. At this point, everyone is just guessing.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoCompanies don't have to give away everything for free. It's already free. Public domain is the natural state of information. They're the ones who insist on copyright so they can maintain the artificial scarcity delusion well into 2023 where AI is literally on its way to automating intellectual work. These irrelevant industries need to stop holding us all back and just disappear already.
- butterfi 4y agoI stopped reading at "“We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists..." It's true, but they big music companies are well known for their business practices.
- CharlesW 4y agoIt's illustrative that, even with its history of lopsided deals with creators, Universal Music has the ethical high ground in this case because at least they have legally-binding business arrangements with their artists.
- shadowgovt 4y agoThere is no ethical high ground here. There is only creative output bent towards the artificial framework of capitalism. One could argue there is some weak ethical underpinning in "In the absence of higher moral values, one should simply adhere to previous agreements and laws..." Except previous agreements and laws give basically no guidance on the topic of "Can I use this data to train a machine to make more data?" Especially if the thusly-created data can't even, itself, be copyrighted. It's a novel use-case unpredicted by the existing copyright framework.
- kneebonian 4y ago"It's better than legal we are using the law to keep justice away" - PHB, Dilbert
- omginternets 4y agoIt would at least be entertaining to see the RIAA sue companies rather than individuals for a change.
- KMnO4 4y ago“Hey independent artist, let’s make a deal. You spend hundreds or thousands of hours creating music and we’ll help you sell it” “Sure, and I assume you’ll want a 10% cut?” “Nope, give me 80% if someone buys it” “But people don’t buy music anymore. How much money will you give me if a thousand people stream my music?” “We can do $2. Take it or leave it.”
- kenjackson 4y agoCan you block the training? It would seem you could block the generation of copyright violations. But training an AI is really the same as me listening to the music. The problem occurs if I copy the music.
- EamonnMR 4y ago> But training an AI is really the same as me listening to the music. That remains to be seen, legally. I think that if copyright law wants to keep existing it's going to have to treat training as a form of copying.
- nradov 4y agoCopyright law already has a section on derivative works. No new laws are needed.
- kenjackson 4y agoBut don’t you have to prove the derivative work based on the content of the work? For example you can’t argue that NBA Youngboy’s songs are derivative of the Beetles just because he heard them. You have to show in the work it is derivative. Likewise, you’d need to show the output of the AI is derivative.
- nradov 4y agoYes, exactly. Existing copyright law is adequate to cover that situation.
- kenjackson 4y agoFunny how the same exact statement with different context (from my perspective) leads to different interpretations. I fully agree with your statement now. :-)
- EamonnMR 4y ago
- mbesto 4y ago> UMG spokesperson told the FT: “We have a moral... Fancy coming from UMG sitting on the moral high ground that they do... /s
- cloudking 4y agoPrediction: regulation will require AI companies to have copyright licenses granted for training data. There will be legal models trained on datasets that have copyright granted, and illegal black market models trained on copyrighted materials. However, it will be really difficult to enforce and prove what data was used for training in each.
- kneebonian 4y agoFurther predicition: There will be a certification process that will be required to prove you only used data you have legally obtained. Running or hosting a model will be grounds for a fine, or possible criminal penalties.
- mock-possum 4y agoI think it’ll be more like using samples in music - probably not a big deal until you’re making a bunch of money, and then people come after you for licensing fees.
- mtillman 4y agoA certification would happen in the EU first.
- InCityDreams 4y ago...with the states and the uk to follow, rather like the gdpr-like privacy setup in Cali.
- metry 4y agoThis could be true.
- oh_sigh 4y agoPrediction: clean room AI will forever lag behind AI that hoovers up whatever data it can get it's hands on.
- 4y ago
- rvz 4y agoWait hang on, the AI bros want their 'fair use' back and want to freely generate their AI models on copyrighted music, for redistribution without permission from the record labels. Not this time. Not with the music and records industry which has deep pockets and isn't tired of litigation. Google themselves wouldn't even risk it either.
- sebzim4500 4y agoThe record labels have deep pockets but so do tech companies/VCs. This one isn't going to be settled by a competition of who can throw more money at the problem, it will be settled as it should be: a mostly arbitrary decision by some a 75 year old judge who doesn't really understand what is going on.
- blibble 4y ago75 year old judge: so you take their work, pay them nothing and then use that to output something which then competes with the original work? sounds like the opposite of "fair use" to me!
- xbar 4y agoThat is surely going to work.
- jacknews 4y agoLOL. Horse, bolted. Already roaming free.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoRoaming free and doing coke with her best friend, Privacy.
- blibble 4y agothat's fine, we can use copyright law to go after everyone that's ever used or operated a AI model that was built on unlicensed works my work has been ingested into copilot, so every line that copilot has ever output is an unauthorised derivative of my work if the fair-use question is settled in the way I think it will be: I personally I plan to go after every single person/entity that's ever published code using copilot $150,000 an infringement, isn't it? (and if it isn't, well that's the end of copyright entirely)
- 3dfan 4y agoSoon AI will not need a lot of training data anymore. Anybody will be able to let their computer listen to one Metallica record and say "Do you hear this? This is called heavy metal. Can you make an album like this? With distorted guitars, a screaming singer and heavy drums?" and the AI will understand the whole concept and make a new heavy metal album.
- shadowgovt 4y agoWell, they're welcome to try. If there's a potential for it to be fair-use, the researcher can scrape the data any way they can get their hands on it. Universal is certainly able to ask specific channels to refrain from facilitating this use case, but that won't stop the training (it'll just make it necessary to go through the analog hole and slow it down a bit).
- HlessClaudesman 4y agoYup, copyright enthusiasts can hobble a few specific applications but everyone else will just switch to more customisable / performant models with no training attribution or fingerprinting. Users are going to gravitate to whatever works best, and ever twas it thus.
- cfiggers 4y agoMaybe the answer is to make every individual instance of a copyrighted work in an AI's training set a full breach of copyright, for each monetized/monetizable inference made by the trained AI. Maybe Open AI alone has already racked up quadrillions of dollars in back damages.
- shadowgovt 4y agoQuintillions, even. The beauty of monetizing ideas is you can assign any dollar value you want to them, because the whole idea that ideas have dollar values is, itself, a made-up idea.
- gumballindie 4y agoExcellent. Now do software. Open or closed, companies _must_ respect licensing terms in order to incorporate code in their products. They resell it without permission in most cases.
- jbb_hn 4y agoI get that they need to try to do this. However, it seems they learned nothing from the Napster/mp3 era. The genie is out of the bottle. Movie industry will follow suit to try and prevent script writing in "the style of <insert director here>"
- londons_explore 4y agoHorse doors stable bolted?
- hn8305823 4y agoIf it's derivative and transformative, is it actually a copyright violation?
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoPlease buy a CD and use that for training. Don't train your AI to produce mp3 compression artefacts.
- eternalban 4y agoI’ve seen a specific hex string used in a robots.txt equivalent in one of the big players’ repos. It may have been an openAi or Meta repo on prompt fine-tunings but can’t recall which atm.