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A comment on AI song featuring fake Drake and Weeknd vocals pulled from streaming services. Parent comment

Re:AI song featuring fake Drake and Weeknd vocals pulled fro... by rchaud on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @12:15PM (#35615994)
It's copyrightable if it runs Drake's voice through software and then generates an imitation. It's not if he personally listened to a lot of Drake and recorded his own vocal imitation with off the shelf instruments.

This is a PR stunt, it will never go to court anyway. But if it did, the way to have done this legally would have been the Death Row Records approach when Snoop Dogg left them in 1996. They simply signed a rapper who sounded like Snoop, gave called him Top Dogg, and had him perform guest verses for other label acts. He appears on 2pac's "All About U", recorded at a time when both Dr. Dre and Snoop had left the label.

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Re:AI song featuring fake Drake and Weeknd vocals pulled fro... by realce on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @12:36PM (#35616321)
So if I'm personally inspired by a Drake song I heard and use that memory and inspiration to create music in a similar style to Drake, I'm a criminal? Why does the kinds of tools/software used to create the end product matter at all?
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Re:AI song featuring fake Drake and Weeknd vocals pulled fro... by spaceman_2020 on Wednesday April 19, 2023 @01:14AM (#35624487)
Weeknd, by his own admission, heavily channels Michael Jackson. I'm no lawyer but singing style and voice don't really seem copyrightable at all.
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Re:AI song featuring fake Drake and Weeknd vocals pulled fro... by rockemsockem on Tuesday April 18, 2023 @01:07PM (#35616754)
I know everyone abuses words on the Internet, but voices are definitively not copyrightable.

What they *might* be is protected by other laws. The closest case the US has seen is this Bette Midler one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

But the circumstances there make it different from a lot of AI voice work since in her case there could be no claim that sounding like her was a coincidence since Ford had an impersonator sing one of her songs (which they did properly secure copyright to use).

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