In this week’s Legal Beat, Universal Music targets AI training, DJ Envy’s pal is charged with running a Ponzi scheme, Megan settles with her label and more.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
The creators of other forms of content had already been in court for months. A group of photographers and Getty Images sued Stability AI over its training practices in January, and a slew of book authors, includingwriter George R.R. Martin and legal novelist John Grisham, sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI over the same thing in June and again in September. And music industry voices, like the RIAA andFor months, we asked around, scanned dockets and waited for the music equivalent.
Like the previous cases filed by photographers and authors, the new lawsuit poses something of an existential question for AI companies. AI models are only as good as the “inputs” they ingest; if federal courts make all copyrighted material off-limits for such purposes, it would not only make current models illegal but would undoubtedly hamstring further development.
Are AI models, which imbibe millions of copyrighted works to create something new, the next landmark fair use? Or are they just a new form of copyright piracy on a vast new scale? We’re about to find out.– The timing of the lawsuit would suggest that UMG is aiming for a carrot-and-stick approach when it comes to AI.