Udio Admits Scraping YouTube Audio to Train AI Models
This admission comes after the AI music company denied Sony Music Entertainment’s copyright infringement claim
Udio has admitted it scraped audio from YouTube for AI training. In defense of this action, the major AI music company claims that US copyright law doesn’t criminalize the use of videos that are available to the public.
Background:
The admission came in response to Sony's latest complaint in its long-running lawsuit against Udio.
Sony is the last of the three majors to maintain litigation against Udio. Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG) dropped their suits last year.
UMG and WMG included scraping YouTube as part of their complaints.
What’s happening now:
Udio admitted to using “a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings," but denies direct use of copyrighted material.
Udio also admitted to charging a monthly fee to use its services, meaning that if the company did in fact use copyrighted material to train its models, it is now making a profit from that action.
The issue being argued is whether that material was acquired illegally.
Udio claims that grabbing audio from YouTube falls under the “fair use” exemption because the videos are publicly available.
In response to Sony’s claim that scraping YouTube does violate the law, Udio’s legal team replied: “The allegations in this paragraph contain legal conclusions to which no response is required.”
👋 Disclosures & Transparency Block
This article was written with information sourced from Music Business Worldwide.
We covered it because this suit will have a significant influence on how AI companies operate in the music industry.
