The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) led a group of 10 music community leaders, including the Nashville Songwriters’ Association International and the Recording Academy, calling on the Administration’s AI Action Plan to promote American leadership in protecting both IP and AI by encouraging free market licensing for AI training, requiring human authorship for copyright, rejecting other countries’ enacting new TDM exceptions that would allow for theft of American content, and enhanced recordkeeping and transparency.
Highlights suggest:
“[P]rogress in AI innovation and strong copyright protection are not mutually exclusive. It is not a zero-sum game. Both 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.”
“[B]efore AI developers and deployers deploy AI systems, they must first obtain appropriate licenses for any copyrighted works they use to train their AI models, and appropriate authorization if they use a person’s name, image, likeness, or voice in connection with such training. Consistent with U.S. law and free market principles, these licenses should be negotiated without regulation and in the free market to ensure fair value and economic competitiveness.”
“[O]ur Nation’s longstanding legal precedent clearly establishes that copyright should protect only human expression. The Copyright Office’s recent report on copyrightability makes clear that this settled doctrine applies equally in the context of AI. This approach is consistent with our Constitutional values and promotes human flourishing. The Constitution only protects the rights of human beings. Machines cannot and should not have the same rights.”
“[W]hile certain TDM exceptions might be justified for very specific types of unprotected data, bad actors are using them as a trojan horse to take American copyrighted works for free, denying American copyright holders’ compensation for use of their creations, and undermining the robust U.S. AI training data licensing market…. To level the playing field, deter the offshoring of AI sector investment, and prevent foreign control of American works and data, the U.S. should lead in opposing, and the Plan should oppose, TDM exceptions that include copyrighted works.”
“One real, practical barrier to AI adoption is the level of skepticism that end users have regarding AI… To overcome such skepticism and build trust in AI, including trust that training materials are legitimate and high quality, the Plan should require adequate record keeping and transparency concerning AI training materials and the outputs from AI algorithms.”
“America must be first in encouraging the development of both AI and IP. Ripping off AI companies through distillation to create competing models is wrong, and ripping off creators through unlicensed copying to create competing works is also wrong. We hope the Administration will stand behind American creators and AI companies who both need to thrive to win the global race on AI. American law protects creators, and we should demand that other countries do the same. American culture is the most popular in the world. We should stand firm against other countries passing exceptions to their laws that would allow AI companies to copy American content for free, driving AI development away from the USA. That would result in a double loss for our country,” said RIAA Chairman & CEO Mitch Glazier.
Read the full filing HERE
