Tag: AI Litigation

@ArtistRights Symposium 5 Panel: Beware the AI Opt-In: Hidden Right of Publicity Waivers

Registration is open for Artist Rights Symposium 5 at Eventbrite!

The Artist Rights Symposium 5 is coming on October 19 at Tweed Recording in Athens, GA hosted by the University of Georgia Terry College of Business Music Certificate Program and the School of Policy and International Affairs, and the Artist Rights Institute. More about the Symposium here and register on Eventbrite here.

As AI companies like Suno and Udio settle copyright lawsuits with record companies and music publishers, they introduce new licensing arrangements. Artists and songwriters may be offered the “opportunity” to “opt in” to the settlements and “new revenue streams”. But not all revenue streams are equal, remember streaming? Remember “Let’s help that plucky startup Spotify”? We have seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

Why a Suno Copyright Settlement Is Different from Spotify, LimeWire—or Even Bartz

The music industry has settled copyright infringement disputes before. Spotify’s mechanical royalty settlements in David Lowery’s class action resolved claims over unpaid or improperly licensed compositions. LimeWire’s settlement addressed unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted recordings. In both cases, the essential bargain concerned compensation for past copyright infringement, not permission to reproduce the identity of the human beings who created the music. Identity theft never came up.

Suno presents a fundamentally different problem. Its generative AI technology can potentially reproduce not merely copyrighted expression but recognizable characteristics of an artist’s voice, performance and identity—what Chris has called  personhood signals. A settlement that licenses recordings for future training may therefore implicate rights that neither the record company nor publisher controls. That’s why they need the “opt in” agreement to waive these rights because the AI platform doesn’t want to pay for the artist’s identify if the artist would even consider that deal. Many artists and songwriters, if not most, will not.

The Bartz v. Anthropic settlement illustrates the limitation of treating AI disputes exclusively as copyright cases. Bartzcompensates copyright owners for specified historical conduct involving pirated books. It settles the claims brought in litigation, so does not expressly resolve the separate problem of extracting and commercializing human identity. That is what a conventional copyright settlement misses.

Settling infringement of the work does not settle exploitation of the person. And no copyright settlement should quietly become consent to commercialize someone’s voice, identity or personhood.

So artists, their managers and lawyers are asking, what exactly are we being asked to agree to this time? Before you even get to the “new revenue stream,” an opt-in for an apparent copyright settlement may also include permission for future AI training, broad releases, perpetual covenants not to sue, or waivers of an artist’s rights in their name, voice and identity. These are fundamentally different transactions, with potentially permanent consequences. Before signing, creators need to understand not only what they will be paid, but what rights they are surrendering, how those rights may be exploited, and whether they can ever get them back.

Meet the Panelists

Chris Castle will lead the closing panel at Artist Rights Symposium 5, that warns “Beware the AI Opt-In: Hidden Right of Publicity Waivers.” The panel brings together four speakers with complementary perspectives on artist advocacy, litigation and music-industry licensing.

Jen Jacobsen, Artist Rights Alliance.  Friend of the show Jen Jacobsen is a long time artist rights advocate who brings the artist-advocacy perspective, focusing on meaningful consent, transparency and protecting musicians from agreements that may surrender irreversible grants of rights with hidden waivers.

George Zelcs of Korein Tillery.  George Zelcs is the lead counsel on the Jason Isbell/David Lowery personhood class action against Suno to help us understand the implications of “opt in” agreements with waivers on rights of publicity and the practical question of what remedies artists should retain.

Gwendolyn Seale — Gwen Seale PLLC.  Gwen brings experience representing songwriters and music copyright owners, with particular relevance to licensing authority, co-writer and co-owner interests, compensation and contractual protections.

Tim Kappel — Wells Kappel.  Tim is a copyright expert and artist rights advocate who successfully argued in federal trial court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that his client Cyril Vetter should retain foreign rights as part of a statutory copyright termination— a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The panel is scheduled for 3:00–4:00 p.m. on October 19. 

Three Deals Disguised as One?

An AI opt-in may combine three distinct transactions as part of the copyright settlement and go-forward license: compensation for past unauthorized uses (probably not shared by the label, but check), licensing for future model training, and revenue sharing from products built on those models (but don’t hold your breath). But accepting settlement compensation for yesterday’s conduct should not automatically mean consenting to tomorrow’s exploitation. 

There may also be a fourth transaction: authorization to use an artist’s name, voice, likeness or other personhood rights which could not have been brought by a record company or music publisher because they do not control those rights.

A copyright license is not permission to commercialize personhood.

The panel will examine how these rights can become entangled, particularly when record companies, publishers or other representatives may not control all the rights an AI company seeks.

What Happens After You Sign?

The panel will address the questions that can be overlooked when attention focuses on the size of a settlement or the promise of future royalties.

What exactly is inside the AI company’s “walled garden”? How are revenues attributed to particular recordings or compositions? Can users generate synthetic voices or prompt an artist’s name? Can artists examine the product before consenting? 

And what happens when an artist wants out later when the term expires (if there is a term)? Deleting a source recording does not necessarily remove its influence from an already-trained model. Termination, machine unlearning, continuing model exploitation and rights that survive expiration may determine whether an opt-in becomes a one-way door in an AI Hotel California.

Register for Artist Rights Symposium V on Eventbrite

Related reading: The AI “License” That Isn’t: A Musician’s Checklist for Spotting a Covenant Not to Sue Censorship Trap in Disguise.

by thetrichordist

@DavidSacks Isn’t a Neutral Observer—He’s an Architect of the AI Circular-Investment Maze

When White House AI Czar David Sacks tweets confidently that “there will be no federal bailout for AI” because “five major frontier model companies” will simply replace each other, he is not speaking as a neutral observer. He is speaking as a venture capitalist with overlapping financial ties to the very AI companies now engaged in the most circular investment structure Silicon Valley has engineered since the dot-com bubble—but on a scale measured not in millions or even billions, but in trillions.

Sacks is a PayPal alumnus turned political-tech kingmaker who has positioned himself at the intersection of public policy and private AI investment. His recent stint as a Special Government Employee to the federal government raised eyebrows precisely because of this dual role. Yet he now frames the AI sector as a robust ecosystem that can absorb firm-level failure without systemic consequence.

The numbers say otherwise. The diagram circulating in the X-thread exposes the real structure: mutually dependent investments tied together through cross-equity stakes, GPU pre-purchases, cloud-compute lock-ins, and stock-option-backed revenue games. So Microsoft invests in OpenAI; OpenAI pays Microsoft for cloud resources; Microsoft books the revenue and inflates its stake OpenAI. Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI buys tens of billions in Nvidia chips; Nvidia’s valuation inflates; and that valuation becomes the collateral propping up the entire sector. Oracle buys Nvidia chips; OpenAI signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle; Oracle books the upside. Every player’s “growth” relies on every other player’s spending.

This is not competition. It is a closed liquidity loop. And it’s a repeat of the dot-bomb “carriage” deals that contributed to the stock market crash in 2000.

And underlying all of it is the real endgame: a frantic rush to secure taxpayer-funded backstops—through federal energy deals, subsidized data-center access, CHIPS-style grants, or Department of Energy land leases—to pay for the staggering infrastructure costs required to keep this circularity spinning. The singularity may be speculative, but the push for a public subsidy to sustain it is very real.

Call it what it is: an industry searching for a government-sized safety net while insisting it doesn’t need one.

In the meantime, the circular investing game serves another purpose: it manufactures sky-high paper valuations that can be recycled into legal war chests. Those inflated asset values are now being used to bankroll litigation and lobbying campaigns aimed at rewriting copyright, fair use, and publicity law so that AI firms can keep strip-mining culture without paying for it.

The same feedback loop that props up their stock prices is funding the effort to devalue the work of every writer, musician, actor, and visual artist on the planet—and to lock that extraction in as a permanent feature of the digital economy.

by Trichordist