Good clarification of fair use, the use of the material itself in certain contexts.
Training an AI is much closer to listening to music or looking at art. It's setting billions of parameters via techniques like stochastic gradient descent on massive data sets. It would be pretty hard to say that the value of any of those parameters is infringement. However, the output of the AI can infringe. As an example, the same article I quoted above noted that Google has an advanced music AI trained on 280,000 hours of music, but has not released it yet because about 1% of its output was thought to be infringing material.
https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/
I'm not a legal expert on the subject (I know way more about the underlying technology) but it seems that what you can and can't copyright is perhaps most well defined for music than other artistic material.
Good clarification of fair use, the use of the material itself in certain contexts.
Training an AI is much closer to listening to music or looking at art. It's setting billions of parameters via techniques like stochastic gradient descent on massive data sets. It would be pretty hard to say that the value of any of those parameters is infringement. However, the output of the AI can infringe. As an example, the same article I quoted above noted that Google has an advanced music AI trained on 280,000 hours of music, but has not released it yet because about 1% of its output was thought to be infringing material.
https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/
I'm not a legal expert on the subject (I know way more about the underlying technology) but it seems that what you can and can't copyright is perhaps most well defined for music than other artistic material.
You've touched on a couple of things that are pretty interesting!
A little bit about my background: I've litigated music copyright cases in several federal district courts and courts of appeal (as counsel; I practiced law before going into music full-time many years ago), and have guest-lectured on the topic at U of Michigan School of Music, AES, U of Detroit Law School and others, because I can draw from the perspectives of both law and music.
I still occasionally negotiate licenses to musical and other artistic works for ad agencies. I recently did so working with a few famous artist's estates, for a client I often create music for. So here goes:
There are no set definitions relating to music as to what is or isn't subject to copyright. There are no preordained legal criteria. It's amorphous. Every case is determined on its own merits, by the court and jury (or judge if juries are waived by the parties).
The law simply requires a creative work of some kind, without fully defining it. The copyright is 100% complete and owned by the creator once it's "affixed to a tangible medium;" that can be a recording, score paper, a computer file, and on and on.
No copyright registration is needed, here or in most countries, under the provisions of the Berne Convention, a treaty the US joined in 1987, after nearly 100 years of not joining it. Copyright renewals are no longer needed.
The same copyright laws apply to music, visual art, cinema, books, photographs and other artistic works. The distinctions are minimal.
I think the intent of leaving certain definitions open was to allow for flexibility in the arts as they develop. Unfortunately, when it comes to this kind of thing, flexibility can also lead to practical confusion. In any case, copyright is far less well-defined than most might think!
Federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over all copyright matters. Registration used to be required to lay claim to a copyright, but now registration is only required to access the jurisdiction of the federal court. In other words, to sue you must register the copyright. Otherwise it's not necessary. But I recommend it regardless.
In the case of recordings, two copyrights apply: The copyright to the song itself, and the copyright to the recording of the song, which is regarded as a separate creative work. To license a recorded song, for example, both the owner of the song's publishing and the owner of the recording must be contacted in order to have a proper license.
However, a song can be licensed without the recording if someone wants to do a cover. Not the other way around, the recording can't be licensed without the song.
When it comes to photographs and films, other rules get piled on: If there's a person in the film or photograph, there are rules relating to the permission to use the photograph and the likeness of the person that have to be followed, but that's not part of copyright, it's about rights of publicity and privacy. Permission from venues is also often required to use a photograph or film.
I'm barely scratching the surface. There are plenty of wormholes and hidden trap doors.
There are times I wish I didn't even know this stuff, because it can get pretty dull!
