Forming a songwriter union is a hot topic these days, thank you Chappell Roan! Artist Rights Institute put a casual poll in the field to get a sense of what people are thinking about this issue. If you haven’t taken that poll yet, please join us on Survey Monkey here (all results are anonymized) we would love to get your feedback. We will post the results on Trichordist.
Reaction to the poll led to an Artist Rights Institute podcast with Chris Castle and Kevin Casini who both fans of the Trichordist audience, so naturally they wanted to launch the podcast here. There are a number of resources mentioned in the podcast that we have linked to below. Please leave comments if you have questions!
We will be coming back to this topic soon. Feel free to leave comments if you have questions or want us to focus on any particular point.
Copyright 2025 Artist Rights Institute. All Rights Reserved. This video or any transcript may not be used for text or data mining or for the purpose of training artificial intelligence models or systems.
New Survey for Songwriters: We are surveying songwriters about whether they want to form a certified union. Please fill out our short Survey Monkey confidential survey here! Thanks!
Big Tech’s “Text and Data Mining” Lobbying Head Fake
George York of Digital Creators Coalition and RIAA gives an excellent overview of international AI Text and Data Mining (TDM) loopholes and how to plug them. Nov. 20, 2024 Artist Rights Symposium, Washington, DC. Watch the Symposium playlist here.
We will be posting excerpts from the Artist Rights Institute’s comment in the UK’s Intellectual Property Office proceeding on AI and copyright. That proceeding is called a “consultation” where the Office solicits comments from the public (wherever located) about a proposed policy.
In this case it was the UK government’s proposal to require creators to “opt out” of AI data scraping by expanding the law in the UK governing “text and data mining” which is what Silicon Valley wants in a big way. This idea produced an enormous backlash from the creative community that we’ll also be covering in coming weeks as it’s very important that Trichordist readers be up to speed on the latest skulduggery by Big Tech in snarfing down all the world’s culture to train their AI (which has already happened and now has to be undone). For a backgrounder on the “text and data mining” controversy, watch this video by George York of the Digital Creators Coalition speaking at the Artist Rights Institute in DC.
In this section of the comment we offer a simple rule of thumb or policy guideline by which to measure the Government’s rules (which could equally apply in America): Can an artist file a criminal complaint against someone like Sam Altman?
If an artist is more likely to be able to get the police to stop their car from being stolen off the street than to get the police to stop the artist’s life’s work from being stolen online by a heavily capitalized AI platform, the policy will fail
Why Can’t Creators Call 999 [or 911]?
We suggest a very simple policy guideline—if an artist is more likely to be able to get the police to stop their car from being stolen off the street than to get the police to stop the artist’s life’s work from being stolen online by a heavily capitalized AI platform, the policy will fail. Alternatively, if an artist can call the police and file a criminal complaint against a Sam Altman or a Sergei Brin for criminal copyright infringement, now we are getting somewhere.
This requires that there be a clear “red light/green light” instruction that can easily be understood and applied by a beat copper. This may seem harsh, but in our experience with the trillion-dollar market cap club, the only thing that gets their attention is a legal action that affects behavior rather than damages. Our experience suggests that what gets their attention most quickly is either an injunction to stop the madness or prison to punish the wrongdoing.
As a threshold matter, it is clear that AI platforms intend to continue scraping all the world’s culture for their purposes without obtaining consent or notifying rightsholders. It is likely that the bigger platforms already have. For example, we have found our own writings included in CoPilot outputs. Not only did we not consent to that use, but we were also never asked. Moreover, CoPilot’s use of these works clearly violates our terms of service. This level of content scraping is hardly what was contemplated with the “data mining” exceptions.
The Artist Rights Institute filed a comment in the UK Intellectual Property Office’s consultation on Copyright and AI that we drafted. The Trichordist will be posting excerpts from that comment from time to time.
Confounding culture with data to confuse both the public and lawmakers requires a vulpine lust that we haven’t seen since the breathless Dot Bomb assault on both copyright and the public financial markets.
We strongly disagree that all the world’s culture can be squeezed through the keyhole of “data” to be “mined” as a matter of legal definitions. In fact, a recent study by leading European scholars have found that data mining exceptions were never intended to excuse copyright infringement:
Generative AI is transforming creative fields by rapidly producing texts, images, music, and videos. These AI creations often seem as impressive as human-made works but require extensive training on vast amounts of data, much of which are copyright protected. This dependency on copyrighted material has sparked legal debates, as AI training involves “copying” and “reproducing” these works, actions that could potentially infringe on copyrights. In defense, AI proponents in the United States invoke “fair use” under Section 107 of the [US] Copyright Act [a losing argument in the one reported case on point[1]], while in Europe, they cite Article 4(1) of the 2019 DSM Directive, which allows certain uses of copyrighted works for “text and data mining.”
This study challenges the prevailing European legal stance, presenting several arguments:
1. The exception for text and data mining should not apply to generative AI training because the technologies differ fundamentally – one processes semantic information only, while the other also extracts syntactic information.
2. There is no suitable copyright exception or limitation to justify the massive infringements occurring during the training of generative AI. This concerns the copying of protected works during data collection, the full or partial replication inside the AI model, and the reproduction of works from the training data initiated by the end-users of AI systems like ChatGPT….[2]
Moreover, the existing text and data mining exception in European law was never intended to address AI scraping and training:
Axel Voss, a German centre-right member of the European parliament, who played a key role in writing the EU’s 2019 copyright directive, said that law was not conceived to deal with generative AI models: systems that can generate text, images or music with a simple text prompt.[3]
Confounding culture with data to confuse both the public and lawmakers requires a vulpine lust that we haven’t seen since the breathless Dot Bomb assault on both copyright and the public financial markets. This lust for data, control and money will drive lobbyists and Big Tech’s amen corner to seek copyright exceptions under the banner of “innovation.” Any country that appeases AI platforms in the hope of cashing in on tech at the expense of culture will be appeasing their way towards an inevitable race to the bottom. More countries can be predictably expected to offer ever more accommodating terms in the face of Silicon Valley’s army of lobbyists who mean to engage in a lightning strike across the world. The fight for the survival of culture is on. The fight for survival of humanity may literally be the next one up.
We are far beyond any reasonable definition of “text and data mining.” What we can expect is for Big Tech to seek to distract both creators and lawmakers with inapt legal diversions such as trying to pretend that snarfing down all with world’s creations is mere “text and data mining”. The ensuing delay will allow AI platforms to enlarge their training databases, raise more money, and further the AI narrative as they profit from the delay and capital formation.
[1]Thomson-Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH v. Ross Intelligence, Inc., (Case No. 1:20-cv-00613 U.S.D.C. Del. Feb. 11, 2025) (Memorandum Opinion, Doc. 770 rejecting fair use asserted by defendant AI platform) available at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.72109/gov.uscourts.ded.72109.770.0.pdf (“[The AI platform]’s use is not transformative because it does not have a ‘further purpose or different character’ from [the copyright owner]’s [citations omitted]…I consider the “likely effect [of the AI platform’s copying]”….The original market is obvious: legal-research platforms. And at least one potential derivative market is also obvious: data to train legal AIs…..Copyrights encourage people to develop things that help society, like [the copyright owner’s] good legal-research tools. Their builders earn the right to be paid accordingly.” Id. at 19-23). See also Kevin Madigan, First of Its Kind Decision Finds AI Training Is Not Fair Use, Copyright Alliance (Feb. 12, 2025) available at https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-training-not-fair-use/ (discussion of AI platform’s landmark loss on fair use defense).
[2] Professor Tim W. Dornis and Professor Sebastian Stober, Copyright Law and Generative AI Training – Technological and Legal Foundations, Recht und Digitalisierung/Digitization and the Law (Dec. 20, 2024)(Abstract) available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4946214.
More than 1,000 musicians have come together to release Is This What You Want?, an album protesting the UK government’s proposed changes to copyright law.
In late 2024, the UK government proposed changing copyright law to allow artificial intelligence companies to build their products using other people’s copyrighted work – music, artworks, text, and more – without a licence.
The musicians on this album came together to protest this. The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces, representing the impact we expect the government’s proposals would have on musicians’ livelihoods.
All profits from the album are being donated to the charity Help Musicians.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the MLC has little to no oversight. The Copyright Office is tasked by Congress with oversight authority over this quasi-governmental organization under the Music Modernization Act. Yet there is nothing happening in the way of guardrails. The Copyright Office haven’t even concluded their mandated five-year review of the MLC that started a year ago. Not only has no one responded to Congressman Fitzgerald’s inquiries about the MLC’s oddball finances, the Copyright Office hasn’t responded to the many public comments demanding answers on the MLC’s sketchy finances as demonstrated on their tax returns.
The MLC’s 2023 tax return shows the quango is holding $1,212,282,220 invested in publicly traded securities–that’s $1.2 BILLION. That’s a fortune for an organization that makes no money–because as we were told ad nauseum the services pay it’s operating costs and bloated salaries-and has no profits because it is not an operating company. But it does hold several fortunes in unmatched royalties it does not seem to be in a hurry to match and pay out to songwriters.
The Supplement to the MLC’s 2023 tax return includes this language:
In our Form 990 for 2023, we provided information regarding funds we were holding in banks and investments as of the beginning of 2023 and the end of 2023. These included assessment funds that we subsequently use to fund our operations; royalty funds we were not yet able to distribute and on which we are required to earn interest in accordance with the Music Modernization Act (MMA) of 2018; and royalty funds we were holding pending distribution.
What the MMA actually says in the black box penalty language of 17 USC §115 (d)(3)(H)(ii) is:
Interest-bearing account.—Accrued royalties for unmatched works (and shares thereof) shall be maintained by the mechanical licensing collective in an interest-bearing account that earns monthly interest—
(I) at the Federal, short-term rate; and
(II) that accrues for the benefit of copyright owners entitled to payment of such accrued royalties.
The black box penalty in 17 USC §115 (d)(3)(H)(ii) is similar to the late fee charged to licensees. The code creates an incentive for the MLC to pay out unmatched funds quickly to avoid the market share distribution of black box which could happen any minute now (particularly since the Copyright Office hasn’t completed the five-year review it started over a year ago).
This language of 17 USC §115 (d)(3)(H)(ii) does not “require” the MLC to “earn interest”, it requires them to PAY interest. Because it is inextricably tied to job performance, it would not be a payment borne by the licensees as part of the administrative assessment as part of the “collective total costs.”
That’s why it’s a penalty. It is, in my view, absolutely false and misleading to state in a matter under the jurisdiction of the federal government that the MLC is in compliance with a code section that does not say what they say it says. And it’s not just this one time, the CEO has said almost these exact words in testimony to the House IP Subcommittee and in supplemental written testimony to answer questions for the record from the Subcommittee.
Even if you want to be generous and accept the MLC’s argument–and it’s just an argument–that the MMA “requires” the MLC to “earn” interest, an “interest bearing account” simply does not contemplate “investing” other people’s money–your money–in publicly traded securities by a stock broker. When asked direct questions about who bears the downside and who gets the ups on their stock trading, the MLC has never answered the question.
The closest to an answer we get from the plain statutory language is that the MLC is required to pay interest on unmatched funds at the “federal short term rate” which is approximately 4.23%. Does that mean that if the MLC makes more than a 4.23% return they keep the upside? Or if the stock brokers don’t achieve that return, does that mean the licensees cough up the difference in additional administrative assessment contributions? Unlikely, so would the MLC’s board members pass the hat? I’ll believe that when I see it.
While the MLC refuses to answer who participates in the benefits or downside of the investment policy, the amount invested in publicly traded securities over 12 months has radically increased from $804,555,579 at the beginning of 2023. As of the end of 2023, the MLC’s holdings in publicly traded securities alone increased to $1,212,282,220, approximately a 50% gain over 12 months. What we don’t know is if that gain is due to slick stock trading, monkey with a dartboard or the addition of new money, Madoff-style. (And of course if they do manage to “blow up the compulsory” which is the latest from the smart people, who knows who gets to keep the black box?)
The MLC offers this explanation:
At the beginning of 2023, we were holding $138.8 million in “Savings and temporary cash investments.” By the end of 2023, we had moved $131.1 million of these funds to “Investments – publicly traded securities,” leaving the remaining $7.7 million in “Savings and temporary cash investments.” At the beginning of 2023, we were holding $804.6 million in “Investments – publicly traded securities.” By the end of 2023, the amount of funds we were holding in this category increased to $1.2 billion. This year-end amount included the $131.1 million we had moved from “Savings and temporary cash investments” into this category during the year.
Realize that this language explains nothing. Not only do they round down by $12,282,220, they simply describe movements of cash without explaining why it happened.
So once again, we are presented with a document that avoids the key issue at best and is misleading at worst. But what is clear is that the MLC has more in holdings that approximately 130 regional banks that have substantial disclosure obligations. It’s looking more and more like a hedge fund.
In a rare treat, Abby North and Chris Castle got to speak with New Orleans attorney Tim Kappel about his client’s case Vetter v. Resnick. The landmark case stands for winning the long-fought principle that termination rights in copyright cause the transfer of the worldwide copyright not just US rights as had been the business practice. The case is a major victory for songwriters and their heirs.
Cyril Vetter and Don Smith co-wrote the song “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” in 1962. They assigned all their interests in the song to Windsong Music Publishers. Vetter later served a termination notice on Resnick to recapture his rights under the U.S. Copyright Act, arguing that this termination applied globally, not just in the U.S. Resnick rejected Vetter’s global termination and Vetter sued for declaratory relief in the Middle District of Louisiana.
In a major win for songwriters and their heirs, Chief District Judge Shelly D. Dick agreed with Vetter, granting him worldwide rights to the song, which contradicted established but inequitable business practices in the U.S. music publishing industry. In the podcast, Chris Castle and Abby North discuss the case with Vetter’s attorney, Tim Kappel. These documents are referenced in the podcast.
The Trichordist 
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