Google has made clear it is going to use the open web to inform and create anything it wants, and nothing can get in its way. Except maybe Frank Sinatra.
There’s only one name that springs to mind when you think of the cutting edge in copyright law online: Frank Sinatra.
There’s nothing more important than making sure his estate — and his label, Universal Music Group — gets paid when people do AI versions of Ol’ Blue Eyes singing “Get Low” on YouTube, right? Even if that means creating an entirely new class of extralegal contractual royalties for big music labels just to protect the online dominance of your video platform while simultaneously insisting that training AI search results on books and news websites without paying anyone is permissible fair use? Right? Right?
This, broadly, is the position that Google is taking after announcing a deal with Universal Music Group yesterday “to develop an AI framework to help us work toward our common goals.” Google is signaling that it will pay off the music industry with special deals that create brand-new — and potentially devastating! — private intellectual property rights, while basically telling the rest of the web that the price of being indexed in Search is complete capitulation to allowing Google to scrape data for AI training.
Let’s walk through it.
The quick background here is that, in April, a track called “Heart on My Sleeve” from an artist called Ghostwriter977 with the AI-generated voices of Drake and the Weeknd went viral. Drake and the Weeknd are Universal Music Group artists, and UMG was not happy about it, widely issuing statements saying music platforms needed to do the right thing and take the tracks down.
Streaming services like Apple and Spotify, which control their entire catalogs, quickly complied. The problem then (and now) was open platforms like YouTube, which generally don’t take user content down without a policy violation — most often, copyright infringement. And here, there wasn’t a clear policy violation: legally, voices are not copyrightable (although individual songs used to train their AI doppelgangers are), and there is no federal law protecting likenesses — it’s all a mishmash of state laws. So UMG fell back on something simple: the track contained a sample of the Metro Boomin producer tag, which is copyrighted, allowing UMG to issue takedown requests to YouTube.
This all created a gigantic policy dilemma for Google, which, like every other AI company, is busily scraping the entire web to train its AI systems. None of these companies are paying anyone for making copies of all that data, and as various copyright lawsuits proliferate, they have mostly fallen back on the idea that these copies are permissible fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
Source : https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/22/23841822/google-youtube-ai-copyright-umg-scraping-universal
