This article alludes to, but never actually brings up, something much more interesting than the project in question:
How can copyright coexist with human-level automatic analysis and synthesis of works of art?
For example, Spotify is flooded with "covers" of hit songs that are made to sound as similar to the original as possible. In my understanding, it doesn't matter how similar it sounds, as long as it's "remade", it's considered a new work of art. So what happens when the cover song process can be automated? It seems likely that courts and lawmakers will need to define a sphere of similarity around each work of art, within which all points are considered copies.
If you make a cover of a recording, it is the latter that you are involved with. You'd have to go to the publishers of a piece of music to license the right to publish your interpretation of the work.
Obviously this post simplifies, but it's already answered.
There's some questions I don't think this addresses, though.
Right now, I have the ability to produce covers of lots of songs. That's addressed in law: if I make a recording, I need to get a mechanical license, if I'm performing at a certain scale I or the venue need to have an agreement with the right publisher for performance rights.
At a personal scale, though, I can perform covers in somebody's living room all day and nobody will care (or would be capable of doing much about it if they did). In fact, once I went looking for an agreement with a publisher for covers a small scale venue and they told me not to bother, because either the venue itself already had the agreement in place or it didn't matter.
But what happens if/when we everyone can have software that is capable of performing a cover of any work it's familiar with? Even if it doesn't have any particular digital copy directly encoded in any way we might now recognize?
If the law expands its definition of copyright to cover that situation, we're getting into territory in which it may be a copyright violation for me to remember a song. Or if enforcement of performance licensing laws starts to extend down to living-room scale performances, we're getting into really invasive surveillance.
But if that doesn't happen, those personal-performance-scale one-off covers (not stored, just part of the capabilities of the particular learning-machine) are probably going to be legal in the same way that my living room performances are right now.
If you had to get permission, these millions of sound-alike tracks wouldn't exist. There's a compulsory license for cover songs, but the question becomes: is it still a cover if a machine does it? Or does it infringe the recordings' copyright since it's merely a "processed" version of the original recording? And how would you tell the difference between a human-cover and a machine-cover? Interesting times ahead...
For a remix, you would also need the permission to use the specific recording, (which can be declined) as well as rights from the song owner.
For example, If you wanted to cover Viva la Vida by Coldplay, you do it and pay the mechanical licensing fees. If you wanted to sample/remix it the recording of Viva la Vida, you would need to contact Capitol Records, who could decline or request specific payment. If you wanted to sample or remix the performance of Viva la Vida from Super Bowl 50, you would probably need the rights from CBS.
I'm pretty sure the law as it stands is robust enough to deal with these issues on the basis of similarity vs substantive difference. A cover usually sounds quite different to an original, enough so that a fan would certainly not consider them the same thing.
OTOH, simply using some well recognised phrases (not necessarily a sample) can infringe on the mechanical rights, which are the copyright on the composition as distinct from the performance.
Also consider fake paintings and photos. Recent cases have shown that even dong things like re-staging an iconic photograph or transferring the image to another medium can constitute copyright infringement. As ever, it comes down to the duck test, generally in the opinion of a judge.
An automated re-encoding of a movie would almost certainly be at least a derivative work (if say, you applied a deep-dream filter to each frame) or at worst a straightforward lossy copy like any other encoding.
In order to be considered a new work, there would need to be some substantial reinterpretation of the original. It shouldn't matter whether that reinterpretation is done dy a human or AI, but current AI just isn't capable of doing that yet.
Disclaimer: IANAL, so treat my understanding of copyright law with the usual level of scepticism applied to Internet comments.
So then the algorithm for creating a cover should include a way to detect whether the song is still within the sphere of similarity. This could be used, for example, to iteratively come to a point where the song is no longer considered similar.
The AI can get as close to the similarity line as possible without infringing on copyright and make the final output even better. This could be applicable for everything from music to patented product designs.
Lyrics excluded, there are plenty of human cases where the cover of a song ends up better and more popular than the original. Hell, many of the most well known singers aren't even very good but just a lot better at marketing than say a classically trained opera singer.
Rather than having a conversational AI that can answer complex question the most immediate and low hanging commercial fruit for AI based companies may very well be along the lines of sucking up intellectual property and spitting out stuff that is as good or better. This might sound like theft but it is exactly what every human content producer is doing.
How can copyright coexist with human-level automatic analysis and synthesis of works of art?
For example, Spotify is flooded with "covers" of hit songs that are made to sound as similar to the original as possible. In my understanding, it doesn't matter how similar it sounds, as long as it's "remade", it's considered a new work of art. So what happens when the cover song process can be automated? It seems likely that courts and lawmakers will need to define a sphere of similarity around each work of art, within which all points are considered copies.