Tomorrow afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee IP Subcommittee will hold a hearing entitled Radio, Music, and Copyrights: 100 Years of Inequity for Recording Artists. The subject of the hearing is—at least ostensibly—to compare and contrast the royalty granting American Radio Fairness Act (AMFA) against the royalty denying Local Radio Freedom Act (LRFA). Witnesses to testify include recording artist Randy Travis; ...
The most prominent copyright lawsuit against Generative AI (GAI) to date dropped yesterday when the major record labels filed complaints against developers Suno and Udio in the District of Massachusetts and the Southern District of New York respectively. This is going to be one to watch, not just because of the size of the plaintiffs and the potential for significant ...
On March 17, Rolling Stone published an article featuring a song called “Soul of the Machine.” Sounding like blues of the early 20th century, the “voice” sings the lyric, “I’m just a soul trapped inside this circuitry.” Naturally, the whole work—music, lyrics, guitar playing, and singing—was produced by artificial intelligence. As writer Brian Hiatt describes, a simple prompt, “solo acoustic ...
Last week, Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act to expand its statutory right of publicity (ROP) law to include voice as a protected aspect of an individual’s “likeness.” In response to artificial intelligence enabling more precise replication of specific, human sounding voices, it is little surprise that the music powerhouse state has taken swift action to explicitly include voice among the ...
If it can be difficult to keep up with artists’ rights in the news, that goes double for music. Fortunately, there are some incredible artists who devote as much energy and passion to rights advocacy as they to do making music—and among those individuals is Blake Morgan. Singer/songwriter, recording artist, indie label owner, and producer, Blake epitomizes the hard-working, middle-class ...
