YouTube has long been one of the most accessible ways for independent artists to get their music out into the world: Anyone can create an account and post content on the site with just a few clicks. But what many artists likely didn’t realize when they clicked “agree” to the platform’s terms of service is that YouTube, and its parent company Google, would later claim the agreement justifies training artificial intelligence models on their music.
Google revealed this position in a legal filing earlier this month, obtained and reported by Billboard, as part of copyright litigation brought by indie artists over the training of its AI music model Lyria 3. While Google did not say whether the artists’ music from YouTube was in the Lyria 3 training data set, it argued that this theoretically would be allowed because the YouTube terms of service grant a “broad license to use the uploaded content” as training fodder.
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This is markedly different from the argument made in court by companies behind other AI music models, such as Suno, that they should be free to train on unlicensed music ripped from the internet due to the fair use principle of copyright law. That’s because Google holds a distinctive position, as the owner of one of the world’s largest music streaming platforms, to make a novel legal argument that it actually does have a license to use everything on YouTube — thus skirting the fair use question altogether.
