Standing up for copyright and ensuring a “free market” for the licensing of AI training will “promote both a healthy economy and continued US leadership in AI”, a consortium of music industry groups have told US President Donald Trump.
That approach, they add, will “deliver additional revenue streams for creators while providing AI companies with free market access to diverse, high-quality sets of human-created content to copy for training”.
There are few surprises in the submission to Trump’s big consultation on AI organised by the Recording Industry Association Of America, and endorsed by organisations representing US artists, songwriters, music publishers and the indie music sector.
AI companies must get permission before using existing content to train their models and must not be allowed to exploit the fair use principle in American copyright law to circumvent that requirement.
The submission mildly massages Trump’s ego – for example, by bigging up what the first Trump administration said about AI – and the US’s leadership position in AI developments is very much highlighted, with an insistence that it’s a pro-copyright approach that will ensure that position is retained.
However, the music industry doesn’t seem to be playing Trump buzzword bingo in its submission, unlike OpenAI which, when presenting its opposing position to the President’s consultation, managed to squeeze in 21 mentions of “national security”, 22 references to big bad China, and no less than 22 uses of the word “freedom”. Which all seemed a little bit over the top, but that’s probably what’s required in Trump land.
The RIAA’s submission instead relies on some solid legal and commercial arguments for why AI companies should get permission before using copyright works; why other countries providing the AI sector with copyright exceptions is not in the interest of the US economy; and why forcing AI businesses to negotiate copyright licences isn’t unreasonable, not least because plenty of AI businesses are already doing just that. The question is: are solid legal and commercial arguments enough in Trump’s White House?
One of the key messages does have a little Trumpy nationalism attached. “Progress in AI innovation and strong copyright protection are not mutually exclusive”, the music organisations are keen to stress. It’s not “a zero-sum game”, they add, and both AI innovation and copyright protection must be “encouraged and promoted with proper incentives and protections, especially since sophisticated foreign actors are a primary driver behind copyright theft that hurts Americans”.
“America can and should lead the world in policies that prevent both the theft of American copyrighted works and the responsible development of AI in a fair and competitive global environment”, it then adds in something nearing a rallying call.
There’s also a section focused on voice and likeness, and the need for new protections for artists and performers in this domain beyond copyright. On this the music organisations do make things a little more personal, noting that it’s not just the voice and likeness of pop stars that is being exploited, without consent, in AI-powered deepfakes.
“Not only are there hundreds of unauthorised AI voice and likeness models of various celebrities”, they write, “one can also easily find publicly available AI voice or image models of political or corporate figures, such as President Trump, Vice President Vance and Elon Musk”.
To that end, they argue, in addition to standing up for copyright and resisting demands from tech companies to treat AI training as fair use, Trump – in the AI Action Plan that will come out of this consultation – should also back the existing proposals in Congress for new rights around digital replicas.