RIAA Raises Concerns Over Digital Music Services Enabling A.I. Piracy
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is sounding the alarm on the potential for A.I. piracy as the technology begins to proliferate throughout the field of music tech.
The emerging prominence of A.I. extractors, mixers and more raises some intriguing questions around creator ethics. Can artificial intelligence infringe upon someone’s copyright? Furthermore, is A.I.-generated content in itself copyrightable?
While those questions linger, the RIAA is proactively taking a strong stance against multiple branches of A.I.-generated content. In its most recent report to the U.S. Trade Representative, the RIAA takes aim at a few specific digital services designed with the intent to use existing copyrighted materials to create derivative works.
"There are online services that, purportedly using artificial intelligence (AI), extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals from a sound recording, and/or generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists," the RIAA states.
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Songmastr and Acapella-Extractor are two of the programs suspected of AI piracy which are explicitly mentioned in the report, although management for these services were reportedly unaware a complaint had been submitted. They are joined by a spate of bootleg download platforms, torrent sites and more.
"To the extent these services, or their partners, are training their AI models using our members’ music, that use is unauthorized and infringes our members’ rights by making unauthorized copies of our members works," the RIAA's report adds. "In any event, the files these services disseminate are either unauthorized copies or unauthorized derivative works of our members’ music."
You can read the full report here, per TorrentFreak.
