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.
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.