Can an AI bot write a song that sounds too much like Stairway To Heaven? Sure. But will the prompt, "Write me a song about a stairway to heaven" reliably infringe on Led Zeppelin's copyright? It might, maybe. Does it matter that the bot might know "Stairway To Heaven" note for note? Maybe, the current crop of lawsuits is certainly predicated on it. And does it even matter if the bot at some point made an internal copy of fragments of "Stairway To Heaven" and "trained on it?" No better than maybe, and again, that's pretty much what we've seen NOT work so far if you're a plaintiff trying to put out your three-alarm-fire with a garden hose.
According to Edward Lee, a Santa Clara University law professor, and voice I pay attention to and recommend you do too, we just reached thirty active lawsuits involving AI companies being sued by various sorts of IP rights holders. But only a handful of them are about music at all, and among those, the focus is mostly on lyrics. Of course they are.
We've heard from Universal for example that prompting Anthropic's Claude AI tool to write a lyric about the day Buddy Holly died produces lyrics that are similar to Don McLean's "American Pie" -- the first song a young Brian McBrearty ever learned to play on the guitar by the way; I was about five and had in my guitar case only that sheet music along with a postcard McLean had kindly sent me, a photograph of him as a young boy, I think. Sorry... digressing...
Nobody is shocked by AI's purported indiscretions. I don't know exactly how these systems are trained, but my sense, and I think most everyone's, is that everything that was on the internet has been "used" and so of course the tool might at this stage spit out a long passage from Harry Potter or Stairway To Heaven now and again. The tool lacks the discretion you'd expect of a six-year-old. It'll grow up.
Copyright is to a great degree vested in originality and similarity. Music's multifaceted and dimensional nature -- what with melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and so forth, each subject to copyright in varied degrees -- adds complexity to intellectual property (IP) and artificial intelligence (AI) and I'm already increasingly evaluating the originality and susceptibility to infringement claims of AI-created songs.
It's pedantic and almost absurd, especially in the case of AI-generated music to throw your hands up and say, "all music is derivative," but not because it's untrue. It's because it's unhelpful. We DO need the incentives that copyright protection provides. And while AI will produce better and better music, art, and everything else, the human connection will probably always carry additional public value and enhance the value of the IP. You might catch me over at Musicologize, being steadfastly sanguine as AI ushers the end of the mediocrity market, but never throwing my hands up about the good stuff. Quite the opposite. But I think the good stuff market is going to be just fine. Maybe that's overly sanguine too.
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