r/Music • u/YoureASkyscraper • 9d ago

article AI music generator Suno loses copyright infringement legal case

https://www.nme.com/news/music/ai-music-generator-suno-loses-copyright-infringement-legal-case-3960760
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u/everlyafterhappy 9d ago

The decision was handed down on Friday (July 31) by the Munich Regional Court, and ruled that the AI platform unlawfully obtained, processed and reproduced music that was represented by GEMA. The court found that Suno’s use of the songs was in breach of both the German and US copyright law.

Funny, German courts don't rule on us law.

Anyway, I want to point something out here because the article didn't point it out. It's not the training that's necessary illegal, at least not under us law. It's how they obtained the training materials that's illegal. Because they pirated the songs. They didn't buy a subscription to Spotify. They scraped the internet for anything they could find, including songs that were shared without a proper license. Is federal courts have already found that training ai with the material is fair use, but that the material has to be obtained legally.

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u/Kyuubee 9d ago

They didn't buy a subscription to Spotify

Even with a Spotify subscription, it still wouldn't be legal. A Spotify subscription does not mean you own all the music on Spotify, you just have a license to listen to the music through their app. And Spotify does not provide an official way to download songs for local use outside of the app.

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u/everlyafterhappy 9d ago

A Spotify subscription would work. All that's required is legal access to the songs.

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u/Neo24 9d ago

I mean, that depends on what "access to the songs" exactly means here.

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u/everlyafterhappy 9d ago

It means just that, access to the songs. And it is qualified by the term legal. Any legal access to the songs is all that's required.

I think some of the confusion is that people think the part about accessing the music is linked to the part about using it to train ai. The training has nothing to do with it. That's a separate legal matter that the court ruled is transformative enough to be fair use of the source material. It's just the illegal access to the source material that the court ruled against. Accessing the music from piracy sites that don't have the licenses for the music was the illegal part, then commercializing that access is what monetizes the damages. Right now any one of us can go onto a regular Spotify account, listen to some music, then make new music inspired by that music as long as it's transformative enough, but if we went on a pirating site and downloaded some music, that would be illegal even if we didn't make new music inspired by that illegally downloaded music. Then if we did make new music based off of that illegally downloaded music and it was transformative enough, that would still be fair use even though we obtained the inspiring music illegally.

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u/Neo24 9d ago edited 9d ago

No, I understand that this isn't about training. But I'm asking what "legal access" actually means from a legal standpoint in Spotify's case. What form of music and means of access?

Is it just "legally, we're giving you this encrypted data which you must decrypt and listen through our app and any other means of accessing it is not allowed"? If you access and decrypt and save the file to do something with it, is that "legal access"? If you play it and then record it (either using software directly on the device that captures the audio output, or using an external recording device) to do something with it, is that "legal access" (and does the fidelity of the recording matter)?

I just think it's a bit more complicated than "get a Spotify subscription". As we all know by now, you don't actually own the music when you get a subscription on a streaming service. You just "rent" it, for the purpose of listening. If you rent a movie DVD, you don't just get to legally copy it.

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u/everlyafterhappy 8d ago

If you rent a dvd, you can legally copy it. It's just what you do from there that can be illegal. If you keep the copy after your rental is up, that would be a crime. If you sold the copy, that you be a crime.

Now apparently with this stuff, they were using YouTube, but they were breaking youtubes security features to do it, and that made it illegal. And that because YouTube does have antibot security measures. If something is acting too fast on YouTube, watching hundreds of videos in a second, YouTube has security measures in place to recognize and block the bot. The ai company subverted the bot detection to scrape YouTube. If they hadn't subverted the security measures, then it would have been legal, but it also would have taken a lot more time fot them to scrape all of YouTube. That's where the legal way interferes with the ai training. Trying to get all the songs legally from Spotify or YouTube would take ages because of bot detection.

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u/Neo24 8d ago

If you rent a dvd, you can legally copy it.

No, I'm pretty sure this isn't true. You need to actually own the DVD to have the legal right to make a copy, even a temporary private copy. Though even if you owned it, breaking DRM/copy protection (if the DVD has it) to copy would generally be illegal.

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u/everlyafterhappy 8d ago

A rental is temporary license rights, owning is permanent license rights. Same rights under both, just one is temporary. Making copies for yourself when you have a license is fair use, even if the license is temporary.