Our colleagues at the Songwriters Association of Canada (S.A.C.) and the Screen Composers Guild of Canada (SCGC) have joined other signatories in urging the Canadian Government to adopt principles that prioritize the rights of music creators when regulating AI.
These principles comprised the following five points:
- Protect human expression: Copyright is designed to protect and reward the value of human expression. Any proposal that weakens or conflicts with this objective should be rejected.
- No new copyright exceptions: There should be no new copyright exceptions that would permit AI developers to use creators’ works without permission to develop AI models.
- Transparency: AI developers must be transparent about the specific works exploited by an AI model and how the works were sourced and used. Creators must be able to identify whether their works have been used.
- AI labeling: Canadians should know whether they are listening to music created by a human or generated by AI. Developers of AI models should be required to implement a method to identify or detect AI-generated content, and the music industry should be encouraged to adopt a labelling standard to identify AI-generated music. That standard could build on existing identifiers, such as explicit content labels.
- Licensing: AI developers must obtain permission from creators or their representatives before using their intellectual property or personality rights, including their voices and likeness.
Read more and download the open letter at the S.A.C. website.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
