Dan Runcie

Thank you so much for having me.

Excited to be here.

The Anthropic Settlement was big, and I think a lot of people in the music industry, specifically on the legal side, opened their eyes up because they saw a pathway for what the future could look like, especially with some of the ongoing legal disputes going on.

The major record labels...

Universal Music, Sony, and Warner have sued some of the AI companies that are using generative AI music, like Suno and Udio, because they believe that those companies had trained their models with the music that Universal Music Group and others own and are the rights holders to.

So what we saw in the Anthropic case play out is that there was a settlement that was reached because they...

deemed that there was copyright infringement based on the book authors from pulling that same information and pulling that same media and using it to train anthropics models, such as Claude, the generative AI platform that a lot of us use.

So from a high level, we think this may end up in a similar settlement, maybe likely a smaller dollar amount, just given some of the terms that are discussed.

But I do think that people see that what happened with Anthropic and the book publishers could be a precedent for what happens with music.

A few ways.

So the book publishers do tend to be a bit more fragmented, I would say, because there are your publishing houses, like your random houses and penguins that are stronger.

But in music, things are much more consolidated because you have your major record labels, the ones I mentioned, but you also have your industry labels.

trade and union organizations like the RIAA, which focuses on the recording side, or the National Music Publishers Association, the NMPA, that focuses on the music publishing side of things.

And all of them come together and form a pretty united front that can help music make sure that it is getting its rights and

making sure that they are getting fairly compensated for any of the use of its music in social media or any things like that.

And that's especially what the crux of this case is.

So I think what we'll see in music is if we were able to see a lawsuit result that happens with this class action case that rewards the booksellers, I think you could see likely similar, if not more action that's taken on the music side because of the strength and the lobbying efforts that already exist and are strong in the industry.

Fair use has been one of these long debated terms.

And it's one of those things where legally people that hold themselves to fair use arguments have had some luck in courts, whether it is people that are using YouTube videos or things like that for their own content.

And a lot of those people have fought cases and they've won those cases.