Canada’s music rights defender sues AI song generator Suno | BetaKit
SOCAN, Canada’s non-profit music rights organization, is suing AI music generation platform Suno, accusing it of infringing on the rights of more than 150 Canadian artists without their consent or providing proper compensation.
“SOCAN has a responsibility to act when the rights of music creators and publishers are put at risk. The evidence shows that the Suno platform has generated and streamed outputs that copy works in our repertoire, and that cannot go unchallenged,” SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown said in a press release on Wednesday. “Innovation can’t come at the expense of human creativity. The future of music must belong to the people who make it.”
The release also said that the legal action is a “necessary and proactive step to ensure that human music creation is valued, respected, and compensated.” The organization added that it expects more violations to come to light as litigation moves forward.
Alongside the lawsuit, which was filed in Canadian federal court on Wednesday, SOCAN has launched a website comparing Suno outputs to songs by Canadian artists like Tom Cochrane and Avril Lavigne. The Suno clips play nearly note-for-note and word-for-word replicas of popular songs like “Life is a Highway.” The lawsuit’s claims have yet to be proven in court. BetaKit has reached out to Suno for comment.
Is it definitely weird to see the public go from hating copyright trolls to now seeing them as allies
It’s a shame both sides can’t lose. Nevertheless, I wish them luck in the legal battle.
This is one of the few times I’ve thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.
This is the worst of all worlds too me. If it was fair it would be good. As in no intellectual property then sure AI can train on anything but the rest of us can own and create culture freely. Or the opposite extreme every work requires express permission. Want to repost a tweet get permission (not a fan of this myself but honestly still better then the current).
If it has to be biased then biasing against the ultra wealthy seems obviously better.
But here we are hoping the current tyrants hurt the new ones a little
Yep, many piracy advocates are suddenly appalled by piracy. Truth is I don’t think many of them ever actually formed a real opinion.
I don’t see any contradiction, piracy is fine when it’s just for personal use, not when you intend to use it to make money, directly or otherwise.
How is this a copyright troll though?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll
You miss my point, how is this non profit a troll? It is suing a corporation on behalf of artists.
Artists or copy rights holders?