The Verge writes about legal issues when an AI composes music.
The word “human” does not appear at all in US copyright law, and there’s not much existing litigation around the word’s absence. This has created a giant gray area and left AI’s place in copyright unclear. It also means the law doesn’t account for AI’s unique abilities, like its potential to work endlessly and mimic the sound of a specific artist.
Not to mention the question of who owns the copyright of this new music. Fascinating discussion here.
Check It Out: A Thorny Problem: When an AI Composes Music
Copyrights usually die off after 50 years (100 sometimes) after the death of the creator – but AI never dies so…..
No, the way I see it is simple: Today a copyright holder can use “work for hire” and as such an AI created piece of crap could be deemed “work for hire” for the copyright holder. That holder obviously could collect the compulsory mechanical license fees if anyone wants to use the AI created junk. A machine itself could never collect anything because it’s not human- it couldn’t sign the contracts involved and in a sense is no more important than the RANDOM arpeggiator on a sequencer that a human pushes the button of to create; the human gets the royalty – not the arpeggiator. 🎸🎤📀
Very interesting article, and yes there are a lot of thorny questions about this.
One though that I think is not that hard, ownership. The AI cannot own anything. Remember the old Wurlitzer organs, you could flip a switch and it would lay down the bast track. If you were to write a song over that track the organ would not own part of your composition. You as the person who chose the base track and overplayed the melody own all of it. A lot of bands use a fake drum track on their recordings. It doesn’t mean Yamaha or whomever owns part of the rights to the songs. For AI created music the song belongs to whomever owns the AI. They are just another musical instrument. This will not change until the AI can negotiate a better contract.