Sony doesn't want companies to use its music to train generative AI algorithms

Alfonso Maruccia

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A hot potato: Sony Music Group is one of the "big three" record labels, along with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. Together, they own and manage a significant portion of the world's music and artists. Along with its competitors, SMG strongly opposes AI companies using music content to train their chatbots or generative algorithms.

Sony sent a letter to more than 700 companies and organizations to take a stand against copyright abuse in AI training practices. Sony Music Group is warning corporations dealing with AI, particularly generative AI ventures, that they are not authorized to use music data owned by the label to teach algorithms how to synthesize audio content.

The letter states that the unauthorized use of copyrighted content to train, develop, or market AI systems harms the interests of the record label and its clients. Artists have the right to control and be compensated for their works, the letter asserts. SMG is banning AI companies from using a wide range of music-related data and content, including album cover art, musical compositions, lyrics, and all related metadata.

SMG affirms its interest in the "inherent and paramount value" of human artistry. The world's oldest music label, established in 1929, has been cautiously and "responsibly" adopting AI algorithms as novel creative tools and acknowledges that they could revolutionize how songwriters and recording artists create music in the near future.

However, innovation must not trample on music artists' rights to retain copyright control and make a living from their art, SMG says. For this reason, the record label is explicitly prohibiting third-party organizations from using its music-related data for AI training in "all relevant jurisdictions." This prohibition also applies to all existing and future creative content belonging to SMG affiliates, Sony Music Publishing, and Sony Music Entertainment, even when such content is publicly available or listed in databases maintained by industry trade organizations.

Generative AI companies have been accused of copyright infringement from the start, regardless of the type of content their algorithms are trained on. Before SMG, the other two big record labels had already expressed their dissatisfaction with the allegedly unlawful behaviors of AI ventures regarding copyrighted music and content.

Universal Music Group asked streaming companies to block data scraping for AI training, even threatening to remove its entire catalog --31.9 percent of the world's commercial music – from infringing platforms. Warner Music Group Corp. CEO Robert Kyncl recently testified in a US Congress hearing about the NO FAKES Act, advocating for a "robust," free-market licensing system along with strong legal protections to regulate the use of copyrighted content for AI training.

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So when it is millions of individual photography and hand-drawn style artists its okay, they cannot financially support coming after us and our intentional abuse of yet-to-be-made regulations, but when its a multi-billion dollar music label corporate interests are conflicting and therefore it magically now isn't regardless?

It should be already proof enough that these trained-data systems regurgitate images and even full paragraphs of text word-for-word, image-for-image. The reason it only applies so-suddenly now to a megacorporation is extremely apparent, and this is not going to change for a long time.
 
The juries are still out on if gen AI falls under fair use doctrine, and that will depend as much on the jurisdiction as it does the court that hears the case. In places where it is ruled fair use, this warning will have little force behind it. In others, who knows. One thing's for sure: the popcorn industry is in for a boom, because lots of popcorn will be consumed by people watching all the legal battles unfold over the next decade or so.
 
Sony owns too much content not to announce some sort of AI partnership soon. This is the company that used to ship malware to paying customers.
 
So when it is millions of individual photography and hand-drawn style artists its okay, they cannot financially support coming after us and our intentional abuse of yet-to-be-made regulations, but when its a multi-billion dollar music label corporate interests are conflicting and therefore it magically now isn't regardless?
It is never ok. But while Sony can defend the content offered by them, how do you imagine they will go to Facebook and insist they protect pictures of users? Lets not get to crazy.

Sony owns too much content not to announce some sort of AI partnership soon.
They are owner of that content. It is kinda to their digression what to do with it. There is a little gain for them to let other large corporation to use their data and use it to start compete on music area. But use their own product for their own benefit is just a normal progress.

For some reason AI companies think they can use anything online to train their models. And do not matter what company Sony is, it is normal for any company to protect their business and as well to decide who they want to sell their products.
 
It is never ok. But while Sony can defend the content offered by them, how do you imagine they will go to Facebook and insist they protect pictures of users? Lets not get to crazy.


They are owner of that content. It is kinda to their digression what to do with it. There is a little gain for them to let other large corporation to use their data and use it to start compete on music area. But use their own product for their own benefit is just a normal progress.

For some reason AI companies think they can use anything online to train their models. And do not matter what company Sony is, it is normal for any company to protect their business and as well to decide who they want to sell their products.
ChatGPT already committed the worlds greatest IP theft in history (the gold rush was scraping web content before GPTBot's prescence was known nor preventible, with no capability to opt out of your already scraped content, this also includes Midjourney's cardinal ethical abuses), even if ChatGPT constitutes as fair use, OpenAI 100% has illegal instructions and photographic material sittimg in their data centers obtained without purchase nor consent.
 
Sony whining about the tide rising... but the tide is still rising and everything will become part of the Borg.
 
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