Unleash the dogs of copyright protection!

It was only a matter of time: the big three record companies, Warner, Sony, and Universal, have brought a joint lawsuit against two small algorithmic music generation companies, Suno and Udio, alleging massive copyright infringement for the alleged use of songs from their catalogs to train generative algorithms.

The three labels want $150,000 for each song used, saying Suno used 662 songs, and Udio, 1,670. Why that number? Who knows? Because they feel like it, because that’s when they got tired of counting, or because they consider it sufficiently dissuasive. According to the three, undoubtedly the most fiercely jealous companies and defenders of the archaic copyright model in the world, “Suno and Udio users have been able to recreate elements of songs such as ‘My Girl’ by The Temptations, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ by Mariah Carey and ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’ by James Brown, and it could generate voices that are ‘indistinguishable’ from musicians like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and ABBA.”

In the world of record labels, listening to a song and being inspired by it to create another is always seen as a crime: anything that “sounds minimally similar” or that “evokes in some way” one of their songs has to be hunted down. The problem is that their music, as is evident, can be listened to by anyone by all sorts of means, so that arguing…