‘The Largest IP Theft In Human History’: Breaking Down The Years-Long Investigation Into How AI Firms Are Stealing Music

Some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and X, scraped copyright-protected music from millions of songwriters, composers and artists to train generative artificial intelligence systems, says international music publishing trade association ICMP. The organization is sharing extensive evidence it has compiled over the past two years exclusively with Billboard, showing that songs by the Beatles, Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Bob Dylan are among the artists whose work was used for training purposes.

The documents were gathered by ICMP using publicly available registries, open-source repositories of training content, leaked materials, research papers and independent research by AI experts. ICMP says that the dossier contains “comprehensive and clear” evidence of the unlicensed use of digital music on a “global and highly extensive scale” for AI training and GenAI music, songwriter and performer image outputs. It also reveals that the scope of the training is larger than previously acknowledged.

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