AI music companies Listen and Udio have hired elite law firm Latham & Watkins to defend themselves against lawsuits filed by three major labels in late June, according to court documents.
The lawsuits, filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group (UMG), claim that Listen and Udio used their AI models to train them to produce music. Labels illegally copied sound recordings that could “saturate the market. Machine-generated content that would directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately eliminate the original sound recordings on which [the services were] has been made.”
Latham & Watkins has already played a key role in defending top companies in the field of artificial intelligence. This includes the firm’s work defending Anthropic against infringement allegations brought last October by UMG, Concord Music Group and ABKCO. Latham represents OpenAI in all of its lawsuits filed by authors and other rights owners, including The New York Times and a lawsuit filed by comedian Sarah Silverman and other writers.
Latham is leading the team. Andrew Goss, Steve Feldman, Sy Damle, Burt Lovejoy And Nate Taylor. The plaintiffs are represented by UMG, WMG and Sony Music. Mueez Kaaba, Maria Rivera, Alexander Parry And Robert Kliger Along with Houston Hennigan Daniel Cloherty Cloherty and Steinberg K.
It’s common for AI companies to argue that training is protected by the fair use doctrine of copyright — a key principle that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law — and it’s likely that this will be heard. And will form the core of Udio’s Latham defence. methods. While fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI firms say it applies equally to “intermediate” use of millions of tasks to build a machine that’s fully functional. Constantly brings out new creations.
So far, both Suno and Udio have declined to comment on whether they have used unlicensed copyrights in their datasets. However, the music industry began to question what was in these datasets, after a series of articles he wrote. Ed Newton-RexAI Music Safety was published by the founder of the non-profit organization Fairly Trained. Worldwide music business. In one of them, Newton-Rex said that he was able to produce music from both Snow and YouTube that had “significant similarities to copyrighted music.
The lawsuit cites circumstantial evidence to support the labels’ belief that Listen and YouTube used their copyrighted material in AI training. It includes songs produced by Suno and Udio that are just like the sounds of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA. Outputs that parrot the producer tags of Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo. and outputs that include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot “And more.