Suno vs. YouTube | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 We talk a lot on the show about AI and how AI is affecting the music industry and how the music industry continues to move through that, navigate that, and so forth. And there are a lot of varying opinions about it. Some people are very, very, very anti-anything AI. Suno is a popular AI app where you can enter some prompts and it'll create music for you. Which website is this from? Oh, I'm sorry. This is from musicbusinessworldwide.com. I always want to credit the site. Musicbusinessworldwide.com has an article up.

0:32 This actually just went up a couple days ago. Suno admits it obtained YouTube audio to train its AI. But challenges UMG and Sony standing to bring stream ripping claim. So UMG, we were just talking about UMG a minute ago when Limp Bizkit sued UMG. UMG, one of the major labels. Sony, another one of the major labels who brought this lawsuit against Suno. It says here, Suno has admitted in a court filing that it obtained audio data from YouTube for use as training data. The admission appears in the AI music company's answer to the first amended complaint.

1:12 from umg capital records and sony so there's actually three major labels involved in this lawsuit against suno suno also alleges that the labels have engaged in quote anti-competitive activities that extend an unlawful monopoly over music unquote and it challenges whether they have standing to bring their youtube stream ripping claim the 26th and by the way so stream ripping so If you play something on YouTube and you record it, or you download it and you use it for other purposes, that's, I guess, in a broad sense, that would be what we mean by stream ripping.

1:52 Or if you extract something from it, that's stream ripping. Because YouTube is not designed for you to be able to just download things. Unless, I guess, if you have YouTube Premium, you can download things, right? But if you just have a generic YouTube account, which is free, obviously, but you can't just go on YouTube and download things. You can only play them unless you get around that, which is actually extraordinarily easy. But anyway, that would be stream ripping. Okay. The 26-page document was filed on September 1 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and reviewed by Music Business Worldwide.

2:34 Here's something from the complaint. Quote, Suno admits that audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YTDLP, the filing states in response to paragraph 49 of the label's complaint. The paragraph alleges Suno used two tools, YTDL, which I assume stands for YouTube download, and YTDLP to, quote, circumvent YouTube's encryption and scrape copyrighted recordings from YouTube, unquote. Suno's response names only YTDLP. By the way, let me just tell you without saying too much.

3:11 There's a bunch of these tools, this YTDL, whatever. There are, if you look, there are a lot, I'm not saying you should do it. I'm just telling you, you don't have to look hard To find things that will let you download things from YouTube or scrape that data, it's not difficult at all. And I guess no one has figured out how to prevent that very specific form of piracy, but it's super easy. Now, finding sites that you can do that with that are safe, where you don't risk malware on your computer, I would just say this.

3:53 Make sure you have a really good... No, I would not say this. Okay. Okay. If you were to hypothetically do such a thing, which you should not do, but if you happen to do it anyway, which you shouldn't, shame on you, bad, bad, bad. But if you do do it, you would want to hypothetically, theoretically, have a really good antivirus program on your computer. That's what I wanted to say. Okay. But don't do that. That's bad. That's wrong. Don't be naughty. Okay. I think we're going to stop there. If you want to read the whole article, it's up at Music Business Worldwide, but my throat is getting very dry.

4:33 I need a drink of water.