AI firms are "illegally" scraping music, according to new investigation
New evidence suggests that companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta are scraping copyrighted music at a scale that is “larger than previously acknowledged".
A new investigation by international music publishing company ICMP suggests that AI firms are “illegally” using copyright-protected music.
Sharing its findings with Billboard, ICMP has reportedly collected more than two years worth of evidence using public registries, open-source repositories of training content, leaked materials, and research from AI experts.
According to ICMP, firms are using songs from artists including The Beatles, Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Gorillaz, Kanye West, and more to train AI, all “without a licence”.
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It suggests that AI tools including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s CoPilot, Meta’s Llama 3, and more have all “scraped” music from platforms such as YouTube to train their models.
ICMP has claimed that its evidence is “comprehensive and clear”, according to Billboard, saying that digital music is being used to train AI at a scale that is “larger than previously acknowledged.”
It also suggests that X’s in-built AI chatbot Grok copies and distributes lyrics of copyrighted music, claiming that the Elon Musk-owned platform is one of the “worst offenders”.
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Speaking to Billboard, ICMP’s Director, John Phelan, explained: “This is the largest IP theft in human history. That’s not hyperbole. We are seeing tens of millions of works being infringed daily.”
“We have extensive evidence of serious copyright infringement,” he says. “Many of these companies are scraping the lyric datasets from the internet of millions of works and putting them into their models.”
According to Phelan, “tens of millions of musical works” are gained upon by these firms, in a “direct breach” of copyright laws and regulations.
Read the full investigation via Billboard, here.
[Via: Billboard]
Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Associate Digital Editor, follow her on Twitter.
