In our most up-to-date DMN Professional Weekly report, Digital Music Information tallied the tens of billions of {dollars} that AI giants have already amassed in funding. However that’s not the largest menace going through main labels as they lock horns with AI behemoths like Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and Microsoft — time is.
For a whole breakdown of latest main label dealmaking within the AI area, take a look at our latest DMN Professional Weekly report on AI voice cloning. In that report, we take a better have a look at the AI handshakes between Common Music Group, Warner Music Group, and YouTube — with Sony Music Leisure noticeably lacking from the image. We additionally add up the large funding struggle chests being amassed by AI giants like Google, Amazon, and OpenAI forward of authorized battles going through the massive three and all the music and content material industries.
For many who consider that AI giants like OpenAI are treating copyrighted content material ethically, Elon Musk has a wake-up name. “That’s an enormous lie,” Musk bluntly said throughout a latest interview at DealBook Summit 2023 whereas addressing claims by AI platforms that copyrighted supplies usually are not getting used to coach algorithms. “These AIs are all coaching on copyrighted knowledge, clearly. It’s a straight-up lie, 100%.”
That’s hardly surprising to these inside the music business, although the harder tablet entails the prolonged authorized and legislative battles that lie forward. Regardless of a string of early legislative victories surrounding human authorship and copyrights, a far greater set of lawsuits will decide whether or not coaching on copyrighted content material constitutes honest use.
Just lately, main AI platforms like Anthropic began saying the quiet half out loud. Final month, the Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic declared {that a} “various array of instances helps the proposition that [the] copying of a copyrighted work as an intermediate step to create a non-infringing output can represent honest use.”
Disagreeing are Common Music Publishing Group, Harmony Music Group and ABKCO, who’re suing the tech behemoth for copyright infringement. Normally, that sort of litigation would cease a startup in its tracks. However Anthropic appears to be navigating a velocity bump: regardless of the large lawsuit, the corporate’s feverish funding tempo has continued, with a whole lot of hundreds of thousands being piled onto the corporate.
Common Music Publishing Group, a part of the most important music conglomerate on the planet, isn’t suing a bunch of pimply-faced coders anymore. Which means hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in authorized charges and doubtlessly years of back-and-forth tussling earlier than a judgment or decision emerges — with simply one of many main AI platforms.
Others are additionally submitting lawsuits towards the giants of AI. ChatGPT developer OpenAI is at present heading off a serious lawsuit filed by a category of creatives led by Sarah Silverman, with a choice doubtlessly years away. Getty Photographs’ infringement lawsuit towards Stability AI has dragged on for practically a yr.
So, what do all these instances have in frequent — apart from the copyright half?
Sadly, all of those instances are more likely to burn time — a lot of it. And that’s the very last thing that litigating copyright homeowners can afford. “By the point these lawsuits are determined, we’ll have digital God at that time,” Musk predicted. “These lawsuits gained’t be determined in a timeframe that’s related.”
In different phrases, the longer these instances drag on, the extra benefit mega-companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI take pleasure in. And the extra doubtless that content material homeowners forge ‘amicable’ agreements like these involving YouTube and main labels UMG and WMG.
DMN Professional Weekly: Ought to We Simply Get Used to AI Voice Cloning?
All of which raises a scary query: how far will AI sophistication and intelligence evolve within the subsequent few years?
Musk has been notably alarmist on AI’s development trajectory, full with Armageddon-tinged predictions. Within the latest DealBook interview, Musk predicted that AI might write a e-book ‘pretty much as good as J.Ok. Rowling,’ uncover a brand new physics precept, or invent a brand new know-how inside three years.
That appears like a really completely different world in 2026, notably for the music business. Whether or not the AI practice goes that quick is not possible to foretell, identical to the nuances of AI’s impression on areas like songwriting, synch licensing, music manufacturing, and even avatar growth. However maybe one factor is for certain: the longer these AI authorized battles drag on, the much less benefit copyright homeowners take pleasure in given the hectic tempo of AI coaching, technological growth, the copyright ingestion.
Whether or not that means better cooperative licensing agreements is value debating. However for these preventing to defend copyright, the courts merely can’t be the one battlefield.