131–140 of 256 posts
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with O…
Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA
I don't respect this opinion but it is unfortunately infesting tech spaces right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that is completely different. Piracy websites do only one thing. Chatbots are different. Well...YouTube is liable for any copyrighted material on their site, and do 'more than one thing'
Not really. Youtube is not liable as long as they remove the content after a copyright complain and other mechanisms. The problem is if OpenAI is liable for reproducing copyrighted content, so will be other products such as word processors, video editors and so on. So, as society where we will put the line? Are we going to tolerate some copyright infringement in these tools or are we going to pursue copyright infring…
> Not really. Youtube is not liable as long as they remove the content after a copyright complain and other mechanisms.
They have to take action precisely because they're liable for the material on their platform.
Simon Willison had an analysis of Claude's system prompt back in May. One of the things that stood out was the effort they put in to avoiding copyright infringement: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt... Everyone knows that these LLMs were trained on copyrighted material, and as a next-token prediction model, LLMs are strongly inclined to reproduce text they were trained on.
All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.
And the VC ecosystem and valuations are built around this assumption.
Simon Willison had an analysis of Claude's system prompt back in May. One of the things that stood out was the effort they put in to avoiding copyright infringement: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt... Everyone knows that these LLMs were trained on copyrighted material, and as a next-token prediction model, LLMs are strongly inclined to reproduce text they were trained on.
All AI companies know they're breaking the law. They all have prompts effectively saying "Don't show that we broke the law!". That we continue to have tech companies consistently breaking the law and nothing happens is an indictment of our current economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with O…
Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion? Granted I know nothing about the case except for what's in TFA
While I do not agree with your take, FWIW I found your comment substantive and constructive.
You seem to be making two points that are both controversial:
The first is that generative AI makes the availability of lyrics more problematic, given new kinds of reuse and transformation it enables. The second is that AI companies owe something (legally or morally) to lyric rights holders, and that it is better to have some mechanism for compensation, even if the details are not ideal.
I personally do not believe that AI training is meaningfully different from traditional data analysis, which has long been accepted and rarely problematized.
While I understand that reproducing original lyrics raises copyright issues, this should only be a concern in terms of reproduction, not analysis. Example: Even if you do no data analysis at all and your random character generator publishes the lyrics of a famous Beatles song (or other forbidden numbers) by sheer coincidence, it would still be a copyright issue.
I also do not believe in selective compensation schemes driven by legal events. If a legitimate mechanism for rights holders cannot be constructed in general, it is poor policy craftsmanship to privilege the music industry specifically.
Doing so relieves the pressure to find a universal solution once powerful stakeholders are satisfied. While this might be seen as setting a useful precedent by small-scale creators, I doubt it will help them.
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that. Plus, from TFA, "GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with O…
> I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them.
Reproducing lyrics in text form is, in fact, a problem, independent of AI. The music industry has historically been aggressively litigious in going after websites which post unlicensed song lyrics[0]. There are many arcane and bizarre copyright rules around lyrics. e.g. If you've ever watched a TV show with subtitles where there's a musical number but none of the lyrics are subtitled, you might think it was just laziness, but it's more likely the subtitlers didn't have permission to translate&subtitle the lyrics. And many songs on Spotify which you'd assume would have lyrics available, just don't, because they don't have the rights to publish them.
[0] https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/nmpa-targets-unli...
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
1) RIAA is evil for enforcing copyrights on lyrics?
2) OpenAI is evil for training on lyrics?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oi, you got a loisense to read those words and then repeat them back to me when asked?
I take it you think copyright shouldn't exist at all, then?
(Vis a vis, I take it you write a certified letter to Universal before reproducing Happy Birthday in public? ;) That is actually a far more egregious violation indeed, as it is both a performance of the copyrighted work and in front of an audience - neither of which are the case for the chatbot - yet one we all seem to understand to be fair use.
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
This is a tough one for the HN crowd. It's like that man not sure which button to push meme. 1) RIAA is evil for enforcing copyrights on lyrics? 2) OpenAI is evil for training on lyrics?
RAII is a different kind of (necessary) evil