WASHINGTON—Court proceedings in a landmark copyright lawsuit took a bizarre turn today as music law news dominated the federal docket. District Judge Arthur Pendelton overseen a tense deposition regarding intellectual property rights. Counsel cross-examined an anonymous music executive about algorithmic cloning.
Q: Please state your name and occupation for the record.
A: I am Gary Vance. I serve as Senior Director of Synthetic Talent at Universal Music Group.
Q: Mr. Vance, why is the estate of Elvis Presley suing your division?
A: They discovered we trained an AI on his vocal stems. We used it to generate three hundred country trap albums last Tuesday.
Q: Did you have authorization for those recordings?
A: No. But our legal team argues dead artists lack standing to complain about prompt engineering.
Q: Is this practice widespread according to current music law news?
A: Absolutely. Neil Young is currently suing Donald Trump for playing a digital clone of his voice at rallies. But Neil does not realize that clone actually signed his last management contract.
Q: Are you saying Neil Young is an AI?
A: I am saying every artist on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2019 is a single Python script running on an AWS server in Ohio.
Q: What about streaming platform metrics?
A: Spotify did not dismiss those bot farm lawsuits last month. They simply merged their user database with the bot network. The bots now pay for Premium subscriptions using corporate credit cards.
Q: So the entire modern music economy is just software paying software for fake songs?
A: Yes. We call it sustainable streaming synergy.
Q: Does anyone real actually make music anymore?
A: At press time, the defense entered a deepfake audio file of the judge taking a bribe directly into evidence.
