Music Platforms Need to Take Down “Heart on My Sleeve” Down, Not YouTube Needs to Shut Down the UMG Platform For Learning To Beat Princes

The Financial Times reported that UMG is in talks with Google to license voice and music for training artificial intelligence models.

The platform said in a blog post it would invest in building its rights management system Content ID, update its policies on uploading manipulated content, and deploy generative AI tools to help detect videos that violate its rules.

Lucian Grainge, UMG chairman and CEO said “central to our vision is taking steps to built a safe, responsible, and profitable ecosystems of music and video.”

In April the track “Heart on My Sleeve” from the artist Ghostwriter977 featuringDrake and the Weeknd went viral, it has since been removed. UMG was not happy about Drake and the Weeknd being part of their group, so they made statements saying music platforms needed to take the tracks down.

There’s nothing more important than making sure his estate — and his label, Universal Music Group — gets paid when people do AI versions of Ol’ Blue Eyes singing “Get Low” on YouTube, right? Even if that means creating an entirely new class of extra legal contractual royalties for big music labels just to protect the online dominance of your video platform at the same time as demanding fair use for training artificial intelligence on books and news websites without paying anyone? Right? Right?

Publishers of websites are still mostly paying humans to make content, and this means that they have no control over the content that is created by Google, which is training its own models on that expensive content.

Second and more importantly, there’s really only one solution that the music industry — especially UMG — is going to accept here, and it’s not toothless AI councils. It’s creating a new royalty system for using artists’ voices that does not exist in current copyright law. If you make a video with an AI voice that sounds like Drake, UMG wants to get paid.

If you are using copyrighted work, you have to admit that you made a copy in the first place, and you also have to use a case-by-case basis to determine if it was fair use.

But Google has to keep the music industry in particular happy because YouTube basically cannot operate without blanket licenses from the labels — no one wants to go back to the labels suing individual parents because their kids were dancing to Prince in a video. Taking TikTok off the table is not a good idea, as it can lead to litigation with the labels.

And the problems here aren’t hard to predict: right now, Content ID generally operates within the framework of intellectual property law. If you make something — a piece of music criticism, say — flagged by Content ID as infringing a copyright and you disagree with it, YouTube never steps in to resolve it but instead imposes some tedious back-and-forth and then, if that doesn’t work out, politely suggests you head to the courts and deal with it legally. (YouTubers generally do not do it) Instead they come up with a series of different ways to get rid of the Content ID flags.

Mohan sandwiched that announcement in between, saying that there would be a bunch of UMG artists and producers that would be part of the new “YouTube Music AI incubator” and that it would be expanding its moderation policies to cover the challenges of artificial intelligence. Instead, we get told that the solution to a technology problem is… more technology!

We’ll continue to invest in the AI-powered technology that helps us protect our community of viewers, creators, artists and songwriters, from Content ID to policies and detection and enforcement systems that keep our platform safe behind us. Yes.

The only thing that’s clear is that the lawsuits could potentially upend the internet and lead to a rethinking of what people can and can’t do with art in their lives. The social internet came up in the age of everything is a remake, and the next decade’s slogan sounds like “Fuck You, Pay Me.”

YouTube is Trying to Have It Both Ways with AI and Copyright Universally: Why Are We Soooo Close? How Are We Going to Lose Our Music Rights?

We know this because, in April, when AI Drake was blowing up on YouTube and UMG was issuing takedowns for the song based on the Metro Boomin sample in the track, UMG’s EVP of digital strategy, Michael Nash, explicitly said so during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

It is really not clear whether scraping data to train AI models is fair use, and anyone confidently predicting how the upcoming set of lawsuits from a cast of characters that includes Sarah Silverman and Getty Images will go is definitely working an angle. (A reminder that human beings are not computers: yes, you can “train” your brain to write like some author by reading all their work, but you haven’t made any copies, which is the entire foundation of copyright law. Stop it.)

Let’s say YouTube extends this new extralegal private right to likenesses and voices to everyone. What happens to Donald Trump impressions in an election year? What about Joe Biden impressions? Where are the line between Ron DeSantis and AI Drake? Regular ol’ DeSantis has never met a speech regulation he didn’t like — how will YouTube withstand the pressure to remove any impression of DeSantis he requests a takedown for after opening the door to removing AI Frank Sinatra? Are we prepared for that, or are we worried about losing our music rights?

Source: Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright

Changing the Web: Ignoring Crawlers in Search Generative Experience: How Google Will Respond to Consumer Demands in Times of an Adversarial Crisis

As of this moment, the only source of traffic on the internet that is able to fit on the web is the internet giant, Google. The situation is not good.

In the meantime, Google is also rolling out the Search Generative Experience (SGE) so that it might answer search queries directly using AI — particularly, lucrative queries about buying things. In fact, almost every SGE demo Google has ever given has ended in a transaction of some kind.

It’s a great deal for consumers, but worse for publishers who can’t say no to search traffic because they don’t have the ability to. It was on the last earnings call that Pichai said, “Over time, this will just be how search works.”

Openai, fresh from analyzing every website in the world to build the tool, just let it be possible to block the crawler in therobots.txt file on your site, which means you can get away with not ranking your site in search.

This will all take a lot of time! It is in the best interest ofgoogle to slow roll it all while it can There is a replacement for robots.txt for more control of the content on the internet that the company is thinking about creating. A lumbering web standards process taking place in the background of an apocalyptic AI fair use legal battle is just fine if no one can turn off your crawler in the meantime!

You know what? The present version of YouTube is a cable network where a lot of user content sits next to numerous licensing deals with TV networks, music labels, and sports leagues. It is the type of walled garden upstarts that were once set out to disrupt.