Music AI companies Suno and Udio recently sought to intervene in a long-running legal battle between the major record companies and stream-ripping service Yout. The stream-ripper has now welcomed that intervention, telling a US appeals court that the AI companies “have it precisely right” when they criticise a 2022 district court ruling in its legal battle with the music industry.
The legal dispute between the majors and Yout - currently being reviewed by the Second Circuit Appeals Court - centres on whether or not the stream-ripper illegally circumvents technical protection measures, or TPMs, put in place by YouTube to stop people grabbing permanent downloads of temporary streams.
In an October court filing, Suno and Udio said that when the district court considered the case against Yout, finding in favour of the majors, it failed to properly distinguish between TPMs that control ‘access’ and TPMs that control ‘copying’.
That distinction is important for Suno and Udio in their own legal battles with the majors. But Yout reckons that the issues raised by the AI companies further demonstrate that that 2022 court ruling was “hopelessly-muddled”, and should therefore be overturned.
As part of their lawsuits against Suno and Udio, the majors have claimed that the AI companies employed music piracy when building their respective training datasets, by ripping audio off YouTube in violation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of TPMs.
However, the AI companies argue, the DMCA only prohibits the circumvention of TPMs that control access to content, not TPMs that control copying. YouTube's TPMs, they then argue, only control copying, therefore they didn’t violate the DMCA. But in the majors v Yout case, the court concluded that the YouTube TPMs were in fact controlling access.
The majors have also responded to Suno and Udio’s intervention in Yout case, insisting that the AI firms have, in fact, got the law precisely wrong. Suno and Udio “deride the district court for adopting a ‘blinkered’ reading” of the DMCA in its Yout ruling, the majors write in a recent court filing, but it is, in fact, the AI companies that “ignore” the relevant section of the DMCA’s “plain language”.
Basically the majors claim that Suno, Udio and now Yout are pretending that a TPM is only an ‘access control’ if it entirely “prevents the public from viewing that content”, which obviously the YouTube TPM does not.
However, the majors insist, the DMCA says an access control is any “technological measure that effectively controls access to a work”, which includes TPMs that restrict how users access content, but don’t necessarily entirely block access.
Nevertheless, Yout reckons that the AI companies are right, and that the district court “improperly conflated access controls and copy controls in such a way that the DMCA's distinctions between the two disappear”. Indeed, that court’s decision “muddles the statutory analysis of these two concepts” to such an extent that its ruling “cannot be salvaged” by the appeals court, “nor should it be”.
Of course, both Suno and Udio have now started to reach settlement agreements with some of the majors. Assuming all three majors ultimately settle with both AI companies, this side show dispute will become less relevant. Although, various independent artists are also suing Suno and Udio with similar arguments to the majors, plus - of course - Yout still hopes to get the 2022 ruling overturned.