Summary
The emergence of AI voice cloning technologies has transformed music creation by enabling extremely accurate imitations of artists’ voices. While this innovation may offer economic and creative opportunities, voice cloning technologies have outrun the pace at which laws can adapt, raising significant challenges to copyright law.
Within the EU, in the context of musical works, AI voice cloning tools introduce risks of infringement during both input (data collection and training) and output (AI-generated content) stages, exploiting vulnerabilities in copyright protection laws. Legal exceptions, like the text and data mining exception, exacerbate these issues by allowing unauthorised uses of protected works, which violates artists’ economic rights and erodes the creative incentive at the heart of copyright law. In response to such challenges, licensing frameworks are developing, rebalancing the reward system by offering financial remedies to artists but also establishing clearer legal boundaries. By ensuring a balance beetween creativity and technological innovation, such licensing schemes aim to restore copyright law’s incentive-based structure.
Ultimately, it is hoped that harmonised reforms and further licensing schemes will be developed in order to uphold the principle of copyright law while fostering sustainable innovation, aligning the interests of creators, producers and AI developers.
