Irving Azoff’s Music Artists Coalition (MAC) has joined a court filing in the New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft.
MAC signed on alongside the Human Consent Foundation (HCF), a nonprofit co-founded by actor Cate Blanchett, and talent agency CAA.
On October 30, the group asked the court for permission to submit a brief on whether rights to creative works can be cleared and licensed for AI use at scale.
The same day, the RIAA, NMPA, ASCAP, BMI, and five other music organizations filed a proposed brief of their own – this one formally backing the plaintiffs.
The HCF group’s request to the court and the music organizations’ brief, both obtained by MBW, can be read in full here and here.
The case combines the Times’ lawsuit with others brought against OpenAI and Microsoft, including by book authors.
Both sides have asked Judge Sidney Stein to settle its central question without a trial: whether training AI models on copyrighted works without a license is “fair use.”
Fair use is the exception in US copyright law that allows copyrighted material to be reused without permission in certain circumstances.
Microsoft has asked the court to hold that training a general-purpose large language model (LLM) on copyrighted works is fair use as a matter of law, according to the RIAA brief.
The music groups are not parties to the case, and their briefs do not seek damages from OpenAI or Microsoft.
But a ruling in the tech companies’ favor could give AI firms being sued by the music business, including Suno, Udio, and Anthropic, a fair use decision from a New York federal court to cite in their own defense. Sony Music has two lawsuits against Udio pending in the same court.
The HCF filing says OpenAI and Microsoft’s requests raise questions over whether rights for AI training “can practically be identified, cleared, and licensed at scale, and whether a functioning market exists for those uses.”
HCF publishes a machine-readable standard that lets creators and rightsholders declare how AI systems may use their work and likeness, according to the filing.
The HCF-led group says it is drawing on experience in “creative-rights licensing, representation, and machine-readable consent infrastructure.”
The group notes that its brief takes “no position on the ultimate disposition” of the motions in front of Stein.
Even so, the brief itself argues, according to TheWrap, which obtained a copy, that the creative industries have “a proven infrastructure and workflows to clear rights for dispersed works at scale.”
TheWrap reports that the brief answers the tech companies’ “dispersed owner” concern by pointing to collective licensing, citing CISAC and BMI as examples.
Its appendix lists supporters including Madonna, Bette Midler, Anne Hathaway, and Emma Thompson, TheWrap adds.
The filing’s other signatories are the National Association of Voice Actors, enterprise AI company Writer, the Creators Coalition on Artificial Intelligence, Blanchett, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, and 311 frontman Nick Hexum. Soderbergh is a founding board member of HCF, and Hexum, like Blanchett, is a co-author of its consent standard.
The filing describes MAC, quoting the group’s own website, as focused on “protecting the rights, financial security, and creative freedoms of musicians.”
The brief from the RIAA, NMPA, and their co-signers asks Stein to rule that OpenAI and Microsoft’s training on the plaintiffs’ works is not fair use.
Those co-signers are A2IM, Songwriters of North America, the Black Music Action Coalition, the Recording Academy, ASCAP, BMI, and the Artist Rights Alliance.
The nine groups claim their members “own or control the majority of music consumed in the United States.”
“AI companies copy millions of copyrighted sound recordings and musical compositions without authorization to train their models to generate a limitless supply of synthetic substitutes that invade the music marketplace,” the RIAA brief states. “AI-generated music floods streaming platforms, tops charts, and dominates social media playlists.
“It displaces human-authored music and deceives consumers, who cannot tell whether they are listening to human artists or to outputs created by a computer.”
The brief argues that OpenAI and Microsoft describe the purpose of their copying too broadly, as teaching AI to communicate and “spread knowledge.”
“An AI model does not ingest romance poetry or bluegrass to learn about language or music at large, but rather to generate substitutes that read and sound like them in practice,” the brief tells Stein.
It adds that the purpose of training on “a John Grisham novel or a Stevie Wonder song” is to teach a model to produce “a Grisham-like legal thriller or a Wonder-like audio file.”
The US Justice Department has compared AI training to author Joan Didion drawing on Ernest Hemingway as an influence, the brief says.
“Law-abiding authors pay for the modest universe of works that inspire them,” the RIAA and its co-signers respond. “They do not steal them by the millions and encode copies on their brains like an AI system does.”
On licensing, the RIAA brief contends: “It is thus a myth that licensing copyrighted works for AI training is either too ‘sporadic’ or speculative to establish a ‘reasonable licensing’ market.”
It rejects Microsoft’s argument that the authors whose works it would need to license are “dispersed, difficult to identify, and costly to negotiate or contract with.”
The brief points to AI licensing deals that all three majors have struck with KLAY, as well as Udio deals with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Merlin; Suno deals with Warner, BMG, and Believe; and ElevenLabs deals with Universal, Kobalt, and Merlin, among others.
“The music industry is as fragmented as the book and news publishing industries, and yet copyright owners of sound recordings license nearly all their recorded music to streaming platforms,” the brief states, also pointing to blanket licensing through ASCAP and BMI.
It cites Deezer’s estimate that AI-generated tracks represent “over 50% of all new music uploaded to the platform.”
Deezer said in July that it was receiving nearly 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day in June, as MBW reported at the time.
Another brief backing the plaintiffs came from the AI Coalition for Data Integrity and nine other organizations, including the Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) and the Music Workers Alliance.
“Protecting copyright is the lifeblood of independent music publishers and songwriters,” that filing says of AIMP.
The coalition says its brief puts before the court the Munich Regional Court’s first-instance rulings in GEMA’s cases against OpenAI and Suno.
The American Federation of Musicians filed a separate brief on October 29 with SAG-AFTRA and both branches of the Writers Guild of America, urging the court to reject a categorical fair use exemption for AI training.
In March, MAC was among eight music groups, alongside the RIAA and NMPA, that backed UMG, Concord, and ABKCO against Anthropic in a brief urging a court to reject Anthropic’s fair use defense.
MAC is not among the signatories to the RIAA brief in the OpenAI case.
In June, MAC was one of 31 organizations that signed an open letter calling on labels and publishers not to opt artists into AI uses by default.
In September, the Justice Department sided with OpenAI, telling Stein that training AI models on text without a license is fair use.
The AI Coalition for Data Integrity’s filing says the US has asked the court to weigh national security and “the competitive position of American developers” in deciding fair use.
The RIAA brief also cites a September ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
That court rejected a fair use defense over AI training in Thomson Reuters’ case against Ross Intelligence, an appeal the RIAA and NMPA had backed.
Stein has yet to rule on the requests from either side.Music Business Worldwide
