False news of the Beatles or a Mariah Carey with a metal voice: technological giants have absorbed “all world music” without respecting copyright, says an international organization of music editors.
“The violation of copyright is a flight”
For almost two years, this International Organization of Musical Editors based in Brussels, which includes specialties and large independent labels in particular, investigated the way in which the generative artificial intelligence (AI) services were fed. Its results, published on September 9 in Billboard Musical Media, are based on online resources, document documents, study of these AI and expert analysis.
The generative AI is not problematic whenever it is “according to the law”, underlines the ICMP, citing the example of the Kobalt Music editor, which announced in August an agreement with Once Music, a platform for the generation of AI songs. But “the violation of copyright is a flight,” insists John Phelan, according to which these practices are “for commercial purposes.”
To collect audio files, the companies involved in the survey use “scraping” web, a practice that uses indexation robots, that is, programs designed to automatically explore the canvas, the ICMP is advancing. “We believe they do it with license services such as YouTube (owned by Google, Editor’s note) and other digital sources,” such as musical platforms, specify the organization.
The lyrics are absorbed to feed certain models, according to the ICMP, which cites the Chinese conversational agent Depseek, reproducing those of Sabrina Carpenter and Edith Piaf, or those of Taylor Swift and Aya Nakamura in Gemini, the Google’s assistant. Generators such as Suno and Udio can also produce songs that include voices, melodies and musical styles copy the original artists, such as the Beatles, Mariah Carey, the Depeche mode or the Beach Boys, according to the organization.
Towards a stronger regulation?
Given this agitation, the beneficiaries require a stronger regulation, particularly through European regulation on artificial intelligence (Act Act), to obtain transparency in the data used and guarantee their income. “It is essential to understand the magnitude of the threat to authors, composers and editors,” alerts Juliette Metz, president of the Music Publishers union chamber, also a member of the ICMP. “There can be no use of music rights protected without a license,” he recalls.
In the United States, the Creator of Start, the creator of AI Claude, announced on September 6 that he had accepted, friendly, paying at least 1.5 billion dollars to a compensation fund for authors, beneficiaries and editors who were looking for the company for illegally downloading millions of books.
The American recording industry association, an American interprofessional organization, brought a legal action against Suno and Udio in June 2024. Without real progress a year later, the three largest universal, Warner and Sony entered negotiations with these companies, with the objective of a license agreement.
Technological giants take refuge regularly behind the “fair use”, an exception to copyright that allow, in certain circumstances, the undisputed use of a job. Requested by AFP, Openai did not want to speak. Google, Mistral, Suno and Udio have not responded.
But already, 100% of the music generated by artificial intelligence interferes with transmission platforms. It represents 28% of the content online every day in Deezer, indicated that the French platform in mid -September, which observes “an increase in power” in a year of these online, put them motivated by “fraudulent activities.”
Source: BFM TV
