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“Left unchecked, copyright exceptions for TDM threaten the sustainability and competitiveness of America’s creative sector and its critical contributions to U.S. GDP, employment and exports.”
Music inspires us. It heals us. It’s there for us when we’re up, down and everywhere in between. Music is a fundamental part of the human experience around the globe and connects the farthest corners of the world around shared values.
The U.S. government has long championed strong copyright protection and enforcement to ensure American music flourishes and creators can thrive. “IP and Music: Feel the Beat of IP,” this year’s World Intellectual Property Day theme, shines a spotlight on music’s unique qualities, ability to connect and the vital foundation of copyright that makes it all possible.
American leadership that has been instrumental in building a strong global baseline that protects music and other creative works has never been so sorely needed as the AI era begins. Seized by the move-fast-and-break-things ethos that failed so spectacularly a decade ago, AI corporations are demanding the right to train their models on ever more vast volumes of other’s works. This includes American copyright-protected music that tech companies are pilfering without permission or paying rightsholders and creators.
It makes no sense. No one disputes that creative works are a valuable and vital input to many AI models. But while developers pay steeply for office space, coders’ salaries, and even the vast stores of energy needed for their server farms, they refuse to pay for the music or other creative works necessary for their business. This is theft and no amount of AI alchemy or lawyerly doublespeak can change that.
In a game of global regulatory arbitrage, AI companies are pressuring foreign governments on every continent to dismantle copyright protection for training large databases. These so called “text and data mining” (TDM) exceptions breach the most fundamental principles of property rights and put the U.S. creative economy – jobs and future growth it creates – at risk. The latest numbers show that the music industry contributes $212 billion to GDP and accounts for 2.5 million jobs to the U.S. economy – all at risk if irresponsible AI giants are exempted from the most basic rules of IP.
Pressed by AI executives, some governments are considering vast TDM exceptions that allow local developers (or anyone who decamps to their shores) to scrape and duplicate U.S. copyrighted content without a license. This race to the bottom deprives American creators of control over their work and pulls the rug out from under the burgeoning market for responsible, licensed AI.
And such exceptions are being considered in the absence of any examples of legitimate use. Not only are these exceptions a solution in search of a problem, they are creating a cascade of new problems, including by driving the offshoring of AI sector investment from the United States and exposing vast amounts of data to foreign control.
That’s a potentially devastating blow to the growth of ethical, pro-artist AI. While developers claim licensing training materials is impractical, we know that’s false – if Spotify, Apple and dozens of other services can cut free market deals to license music for streaming, AI developers can clearly go to the exact same universe of rightsholders and get the permission they need to train.
Some anti-copyright partisans have offered an “opt-out” fig leaf, which they claim allow rightsholders to “reserve their rights.” But that is both technologically infeasible and all but impossible because GenAI developers hide their training practices from public scrutiny and creators have no way to know if, when, or where they need to opt out. And even if the method could work in the future, this does nothing to address downstream uses and synthetic data. Opt-out “protections” are Potemkin ploys to allow foreign developers to use U.S. works to build models under the guise of respecting copyright.
The United States must oppose copyright exceptions for TDM. Such wholesale theft of American IP that is sanctioned by foreign government regulators was precisely what the U.S. government fought to stop under the first Trump Administration, including as part of the 2018 Section 301 investigation that found mass theft of U.S. IP in China. In its Artificial Intelligence for the American People report of 2020, the first Trump Administration called for “AI with American Values” and vowed to promote respect for IP globally in the context of AI. Left unchecked, copyright exceptions for TDM threaten the sustainability and competitiveness of America’s creative sector and its critical contributions to U.S. GDP, employment and exports.
This year’s World IP Day marks a critical moment not only for celebrating music and reflecting on the importance of copyright for the music industry, but also for standing up against those that steal music by diminishing copyright.
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Copyright: stuartmiles