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It's astonishing to me that some people are so incredibly anti-AI that they will side with the RIAA of all organizations. People who are fine with piracy now st

by alexb_ 4y ago

It's astonishing to me that some people are so incredibly anti-AI that they will side with the RIAA of all organizations. People who are fine with piracy now start acting as if copyright and IP are the most important things ever.

dogleash 4y ago
In politics, your traditional opponents can occasionally be right on policy. People who refuse a position because they've found themselves with strange bedfellows are one of the primary reasons things are so fucked these days.
- rchaud 4y ago
  The HN readership consider some villains to be beyond redemption. RIAA, Metallica, Sony-BMG rootkit fiasco, etc.
Sol- 4y ago
Couldn't the same be said for your interpretation of this issue? I don't care much about the RIAA, but I don't particularly want AI impersonation to become commonplace and legitimized. That doesn't mean I "side" with excessive copyright enforcement and so on. Your dislike of the RIAA leads you to believe that someone who is critical of this AI song must be siding with them, which is not really correct.
rchaud 4y ago
Pirates were downloading music for their own personal use. RIAA overstepped by suing them individually. This OTOH is taking existing IP, creating a derivative product, and then uploading it to their Spotify profile, for monetary gain. I think most people can make that distinction.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Is a voice that sounds similar to Drake’s really copyrightable? What if the voice is 20hz higher than Drake’s? I don’t think you can enforce copyrights on someone sounding like someone else. You obviously can’t claim that it’s Drake, but I’m sure I can release a rap song where I rap like Drake (as many artists already do).
  - rchaud 4y ago
    It's copyrightable if it runs Drake's voice through software and then generates an imitation. It's not if he personally listened to a lot of Drake and recorded his own vocal imitation with off the shelf instruments. This is a PR stunt, it will never go to court anyway. But if it did, the way to have done this legally would have been the Death Row Records approach when Snoop Dogg left them in 1996. They simply signed a rapper who sounded like Snoop, gave called him Top Dogg, and had him perform guest verses for other label acts. He appears on 2pac's "All About U", recorded at a time when both Dr. Dre and Snoop had left the label.
    - realce 4y ago
      So if I'm personally inspired by a Drake song I heard and use that memory and inspiration to create music in a similar style to Drake, I'm a criminal? Why does the kinds of tools/software used to create the end product matter at all?
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        Weeknd, by his own admission, heavily channels Michael Jackson. I'm no lawyer but singing style and voice don't really seem copyrightable at all.
    - rockemsockem 4y ago
      I know everyone abuses words on the Internet, but voices are definitively not copyrightable. What they *might* be is protected by other laws. The closest case the US has seen is this Bette Midler one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. But the circumstances there make it different from a lot of AI voice work since in her case there could be no claim that sounding like her was a coincidence since Ford had an impersonator sing one of her songs (which they did properly secure copyright to use).
  - theguppydream 4y ago
    Ghostface Killah is yet to sue Action Bronson.
pavon 4y ago
Producing counterfeits is a completely different issue from piracy and it isn't surprising that people would have different opinions about them despite some lawyers having bundled them together under the label of "Intellectual Property". I frequently saw people getting upset about ripoffs long before AI.
- deltree7 4y ago
  Counterfeits are bad only because the quality was usually much lower than the original. But if counterfeits / copies are of equal quality, I should have the option to buy it as long as it is labelled as such
  - arrosenberg 4y ago
    If it was properly labeled, it wouldn't be a counterfeit.
kmeisthax 4y ago
Most people who are pro-piracy just want noncommercial sharing[0] to be exempted from commercial regulation. The song in question is being sold commercially; it's on a streaming service that pays you per stream. To put this another way: about a year ago the RIAA went after HitPiece, an NFT scam that was trying to sell NFTs of other people's songs. The amount of cognitive dissonance I had when I realized "I am fully in support of the music labels crushing these guys" was immense. What you need to take away from this is: - There are no good guys, so blindly buying into one group is a bad idea. And also even the 'bad guys' might be right once or twice. The RIAA is very much the organization that (legally) stole music from musicians, but that doesn't mean they can't be victims of a crime as well. - Even your principles and priors might need reevaluation in the light of new evidence. Piracy services were empathetic back when the entertainment industry was dead set on not selling their work through the Internet. They stop being as empathetic when they become profitable entities. [0] The RIAA's argument back then was that this wasn't really noncommercial because you could just go up the value chain to find someone who had benefited. Sure, you weren't selling the song, but the platform you were sharing it on could sell access to you...
humanistbot 4y ago
It seems you're in the team sports model of politics. In other words, ideas are not evaluated based on whether they are good or bad towards some principle or goal. They are evaluated based on who supports it. Everything the other team wants must be bad, and must be opposed solely because it comes from that team.

by alexb_ 4y ago

dogleash 4y ago

In politics, your traditional opponents can occasionally be right on policy. People who refuse a position because they've found themselves with strange bedfellows are one of the primary reasons things are so fucked these days.

rchaud 4y ago
The HN readership consider some villains to be beyond redemption. RIAA, Metallica, Sony-BMG rootkit fiasco, etc.

Sol- 4y ago

Couldn't the same be said for your interpretation of this issue? I don't care much about the RIAA, but I don't particularly want AI impersonation to become commonplace and legitimized. That doesn't mean I "side" with excessive copyright enforcement and so on. Your dislike of the RIAA leads you to believe that someone who is critical of this AI song must be siding with them, which is not really correct.

rchaud 4y ago

Pirates were downloading music for their own personal use. RIAA overstepped by suing them individually. This OTOH is taking existing IP, creating a derivative product, and then uploading it to their Spotify profile, for monetary gain. I think most people can make that distinction.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
Is a voice that sounds similar to Drake’s really copyrightable? What if the voice is 20hz higher than Drake’s? I don’t think you can enforce copyrights on someone sounding like someone else. You obviously can’t claim that it’s Drake, but I’m sure I can release a rap song where I rap like Drake (as many artists already do).
- rchaud 4y ago
  It's copyrightable if it runs Drake's voice through software and then generates an imitation. It's not if he personally listened to a lot of Drake and recorded his own vocal imitation with off the shelf instruments. This is a PR stunt, it will never go to court anyway. But if it did, the way to have done this legally would have been the Death Row Records approach when Snoop Dogg left them in 1996. They simply signed a rapper who sounded like Snoop, gave called him Top Dogg, and had him perform guest verses for other label acts. He appears on 2pac's "All About U", recorded at a time when both Dr. Dre and Snoop had left the label.
  - realce 4y ago
    So if I'm personally inspired by a Drake song I heard and use that memory and inspiration to create music in a similar style to Drake, I'm a criminal? Why does the kinds of tools/software used to create the end product matter at all?
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Weeknd, by his own admission, heavily channels Michael Jackson. I'm no lawyer but singing style and voice don't really seem copyrightable at all.
  - rockemsockem 4y ago
    I know everyone abuses words on the Internet, but voices are definitively not copyrightable. What they *might* be is protected by other laws. The closest case the US has seen is this Bette Midler one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co. But the circumstances there make it different from a lot of AI voice work since in her case there could be no claim that sounding like her was a coincidence since Ford had an impersonator sing one of her songs (which they did properly secure copyright to use).
- theguppydream 4y ago
  Ghostface Killah is yet to sue Action Bronson.

pavon 4y ago

Producing counterfeits is a completely different issue from piracy and it isn't surprising that people would have different opinions about them despite some lawyers having bundled them together under the label of "Intellectual Property". I frequently saw people getting upset about ripoffs long before AI.

deltree7 4y ago
Counterfeits are bad only because the quality was usually much lower than the original. But if counterfeits / copies are of equal quality, I should have the option to buy it as long as it is labelled as such
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  If it was properly labeled, it wouldn't be a counterfeit.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Most people who are pro-piracy just want noncommercial sharing[0] to be exempted from commercial regulation. The song in question is being sold commercially; it's on a streaming service that pays you per stream. To put this another way: about a year ago the RIAA went after HitPiece, an NFT scam that was trying to sell NFTs of other people's songs. The amount of cognitive dissonance I had when I realized "I am fully in support of the music labels crushing these guys" was immense. What you need to take away from this is: - There are no good guys, so blindly buying into one group is a bad idea. And also even the 'bad guys' might be right once or twice. The RIAA is very much the organization that (legally) stole music from musicians, but that doesn't mean they can't be victims of a crime as well. - Even your principles and priors might need reevaluation in the light of new evidence. Piracy services were empathetic back when the entertainment industry was dead set on not selling their work through the Internet. They stop being as empathetic when they become profitable entities. [0] The RIAA's argument back then was that this wasn't really noncommercial because you could just go up the value chain to find someone who had benefited. Sure, you weren't selling the song, but the platform you were sharing it on could sell access to you...

humanistbot 4y ago

It seems you're in the team sports model of politics. In other words, ideas are not evaluated based on whether they are good or bad towards some principle or goal. They are evaluated based on who supports it. Everything the other team wants must be bad, and must be opposed solely because it comes from that team.