Reply Comments of the Songwriters Guild of America, the Society of Composers & Lyricists, and tMusic Creators North America
By these Reply Comments to the United States Copyright Office (“USCO”), the Independent Music Creators hereby repeat, reaffirm, and further amplify their views of the principles set forth in the submissions of the US Copyright Alliance, of which SGA, SCL and MCNA are members.
As stressed in those submissions, our organizations are highly supportive of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies as tools to assist human creators in stretching the boundaries of human creativity. Our concerns today focus on clarifying under US copyright and intellectual property laws that the blatant misuse (i.e. “theft”) of our copyrighted musical compositions — with neither consent, credit nor compensation– by their wholesale, unauthorized ingestion into generative AI systems to artificially create infringing derivative works, represent illegal and actionable acts of infringement.
We wish to further note the level of our disappointment over the many comments submitted to the USCO by multi-billion-dollar technology sector corporations and their well-funded supporters. Those submissions nearly unanimously, without legal foundation, assert that:
- Under Section 106 of the US Copyright Act there is no clear right of reproduction or right to create derivative works pertaining to generative artificial intelligence systems, and
- That even if such rights do exist, the principles of the fair use doctrine under Section 107 excuse such unauthorized takings (in the course of what they continue to refer to in Orwellian double speak as the “training” of their generative AI systems) to create unauthorized derivatives for purposes of commercial exploitation.
Those assertions, we believe, are grounded exclusively in greed rather than in law. That belief on our part is bolstered by the fact that commenters from the technology sector uniformly omitted or minimized in their comments the fact that the United States Supreme Court drastically reduced the influence of “transformative use” on fair use determinations earlier this year in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith et al. (“Warhol”).
