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   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 23:00:11 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   Spotify and UMG strike a deal: users can pay extra to make their own "AI remixes" of licensed artists https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-and-umg-strike-licensing-deal-for-ai-covers-remixes/

   And so. What does this mean for FOSS?

   What a question! What do I mean even?

   Well what does it mean for projects which have accepted AIgen patches? UMG and spotify are going to want to make sure that users *have to* pay a premium for such a service. And so what do you think they're going to push for, copyright-wise?

   That's right, if they can make a legal case that the slurry of inputs *can* result in copyrighted output, well...

   What does that mean for AIgen patches applied to FOSS projects? What legal terms, from their slurry of inputs, carry forward? What about attribution, a requirement in even the most permissive of most FOSS licenses? To say nothing of copyleft, and also code released without a license, etc.

   FOSS projects welcoming AIgen patches may be sitting on a ticking time bomb.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 23-May-2026 23:04:27 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     We don't know what the courts will rule, what laws will pass. But we know what the incentives of Disney, the RIAA, have on the copyrighted *inputs* side.

     And what about those running the models? What about them?

     They might have a harder case, people bring up the monkey with a camera case, but this is a risk also. OpenAI's CFO explicitly said in an interview that it would like to pull a Unity, and suddenly upend the situation customers have come to expect and get a licensing cut of every piece of profit assisted by them. https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-future-revenue-sources-2026-1

     The problem with all this is that the legal area is *uncertain*. And it's even more uncertain because it will be ages before there is *international consensus* on how to handle these things.

   • Embed this notice
     Billy Smith (billysmith@social.coop)'s status on Sunday, 24-May-2026 01:14:05 JST Billy Smith

     in reply to

     @cwebber

     And will they pass that money on to all of the people whose work was stolen to create the training data?