A New Day

CRITICAL ROLE 4.27 Complicated Questions

+ bonus Kattigan reaction:

[ID: A digital drawing of Teor Pridesire and Kattigan Vale from Critical Role. They're standing together holding beer cans, Kattigan with his chin resting on Teor's shoulder and a hand on Teor's waist. They're both looking off to the right with unimpressed expressions as Kattigan asks "Do you know what the fuck they're all talking about?" and Teor responds "No." End description.]

Tl;DR:

Google is saying that any music uploaded to YouTube is legally theirs to use in AI training.

This was to try to throw out a copyright case where the victims were trying to sue YouTube for allegedly using their music to train their AI

full discussion

“A new court filing claims that when indie artists upload music to YouTube, they grant a "broad license" that covers the AI initiatives of parent company Google.”

“Google says in a new court filing that YouTube’s terms of service grant a “broad license” for artificial intelligence models to be trained on music uploaded directly to the platform.”

“This argument came in Google’s Monday (June 8) motion to dismiss copyright infringement litigation filed earlier this year by a group of independent artists, songwriters and producers.

The lawsuit claims that Lyria 3, the AI music model launched by Google in February, was trained on songs ripped from YouTube without compensating artists.”

“The case is among dozens that have accused AI companies of illegally training their models on copyrighted sound, text and images in recent years.

In most of these lawsuits — including ones brought by the major record labels against AI music generators Suno and Udio — tech companies have argued that the so-called fair use principle of copyright law allows them to create transformative works without licensing the training data.”

Instead of making a fair use argument, Google is saying “they actually do have a license to train AI with the songs uploaded to YouTube by these indie artists.”

Google says there’s no evidence for Google using their specific works, but also that they have the right to use

the motion cites a clause in YouTube’s terms of service that states, “By providing content to the service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business.”

“if Google’s argument is accepted by the court, the company would be legally permitted to train AI models on and otherwise utilize that content for “derivative works.” However,

the situation might be different for music distributed through YouTube pursuant to licensing agreements with labels and publishers.”