A month ago, The Atlantic published an investigation into four publicly circulating datasets that together contained roughly 21.2 million copyrighted recordings. Accompanying it was a free tool that allowed artists to check whether their songs appeared in the collections. In the week that followed, artists whose music appeared in the results expressed their dismay, with some wondering what legal recourse they had.
A nuance that got lost in the noise is that a song’s presence in a dataset is not proof that any specific company trained on it. Three of the four datasets contain no audio at all, only links to YouTube and Spotify paired with metadata. Developers typically feed these into automated ripping tools that bypass logins, adverts, and the mechanisms that pay creators. The only confirmed users are <a href="https://absafricatv.com/google-asks-eu-top-court-to-uphold-cancellation-of/” title=”Google asks EU top court to uphold cancellation of”>Google and Stability AI, which cited the Free Music Archive, the smallest of the four collections, in published research papers. Nobody knows who downloaded what from the two datasets containing the overwhelming majority of the 21 million tracks because there is currently no legislation requiring disclosure.
