Forensic Musicologist — Brian McBrearty
The headline is GEMA had a good day: injunction, disclosure of some Suno earnings, and damages to be figured out later—generally, its claims were granted. Eight days ago I wrote that a Munich courtroom was about to do something no American court has done yet and I promised we d grade the court together when it ... Read more The post The GEMA v Suno Verdict dropped today. So many questions.…
On July 31, a Munich courtroom is expected to do something no American court has done yet: hand down a verdict on whether an AI music generator infringed the songs it trained on. The case is GEMA v. Suno. GEMA, for American readers, is roughly Germany s ASCAP and BMI rolled into one, and it sued ... Read more The post Germany Is About to Rule on AI Music. What it is and isn t. appeared first on…
The music industry and adjacent ambitious software devs are building tools to pay artists for AI. From a copyright standpoint, it s nonsensical. But maybe that doesn t matter. Attribution is an appealing engineering project. The question of whether AI was trained on copyrighted material is settled. Duh. But the question of whether it was illegal to ... Read more The post AI Music Attribution Is…
I said this case would go away, and it will, eventually. Mark my words, I wrote, back when Bad Bunny s motion to dismiss should ve been the end of it. Consider them marked, I guess. On July 2, Judge André Birotte Jr. denied summary judgment to both ::eyeroll:: sides in the Steely Clevie case, ruled ... Read more The post The Reggaeton Case Survives Again, And Nothing About It Got Better appeared…
Excellent reasons, in fact. Back in December I wrote that Marasco v. Taylor Swift was and is doomed. Today Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed it with prejudice, and if I do say, she did it up right. My complaint the first time around that the case had already collapsed once, but it collapsed on service. ... Read more The post Marasco v. Taylor Swift: Dismissed, and This Time For the Right Reasons…
Miley Cyrus s Flowers case will soon be over, and it will have ended the way I said it would in November 2024, back when the complaint was new. These things can drag, but the musicology was always straightforward. Nobody can tell you when the order lands but the defendants summary judgment motion has been taken ... Read more The post Miley s Flowers Didn t Infringe Bruno s When I Was Your Man.…
Evoking versus infringing, and a helluva case for originality clearance. I caught this one in Aaron Moss s Copyright Lately newsletter, (link to sign up), where he flagged it among four suits (!) Lee Mendelson Film Productions filed in May — against the Interior Department, an auction house, a belt-maker, and a video game publisher — ... Read more The post A Charlie Brown Soundalike Case appeared…
Yes, the portions you created yourself are protectable by copyright. If your new track was half you, half AI, you still created the I DID THAT half. Copyright rules are changing, but your original expression will still be yours. This article will cover what the U.S. Copyright Office s January 2025 Part 2 report on Copyrightability ... Read more The post Can I Copyright a Song I Made with AI?…
A sincere, helpful, slightly uncomfortable note to lyricists releasing AI-composed tracks. You wrote the lyrics. They re yours, they mean something, and they re actually good. Then you may have typed a genre and a vibe into Suno, or Udio, or one of the others, hit generate a few times, and somewhere between the third and eleventh ... Read more The post You Wrote the Lyrics and the AI Wrote the…
Boyd has a federal lawsuit going that says more than she s been offerred thus far. And I don t have time to write a short answer so I m gonna write a long one. If I had more time? I d tell a succinct story about how nobody seems sufficiently focused yet on what the entire case might ... Read more The post How much of Travis Scott, SZA, and Future s Telekinesis could be Victory Boyd s appeared…