Very interesting and they sound as good or better than many royalty free tracks I've heard. The site felt kind of shady at first due to them hiding their terms of use away, but after finding and reading it, there doesn't seem to be any major red flags. Will have to chalk the hiding of it up to bad site design.
The free tier license is a little badly worded in my opinion and it would have been better if they had used something like CC-BY-NC instead of trying to roll their own.
You may use the tracks that are created under a Free plan for non-commercial purposes. That includes ANY use cases that are meant to be non-for-profit, and that are not promoting any commercial activity in any way.
The copyright of the tracks you create is owned by AIVA
You MUST give credit to AIVA when using the track. For example, if you are publishing a video on Youtube with some music composed by AIVA under a Free Plan, you can add the following line in the description of your video: Soundtrack composed by AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist): aiva.ai
In simple terms, AIVA keeps the copyright on the tracks and gives you a non-commercial license to use the tracks as long as you provide attribution. That's pretty normal, but the "not promoting any commercial activity in any way" is a little aggressive in my opinion and raises the annoying question of whether "promoting" your patreon or similar donation mechanisms counts as "commercial activity". Overall, not a major issue, but an annoying one none the less.
It gets slightly more confused if one includes the ToS section on the matter:
Non-Commercial License: Licensor hereby assigns, grants and conveys to Licensee a non-exclusive, non-transferrable and non-commercial license to use, modify and distribute the MIDI and Audio Composition, in any Content that the Licensee holds rights over.
Note the term "non-transferrable". This means that the person who creates the track on AIVA is allowed to "use, modify and distribute" the track, however anyone who receives a copy of the track does not have those rights transferred to them. In other words, InHu has the right to distribute the tracks here, but if I download the tracks I don't have the right to use the track, modify it, or distribute it further to other people. This is not surprising, the purpose of the site is to generate tracks for use in content, not for generating tracks as content.
Again, this isn't a major issue, but overall the information is vague, badly worded, and spread across multiple pages. That isn't how licensing information should be handled; everything should be clear, concise, and located together.
The topic gets even more interesting when you consider the Monkey Selfie precedent and realize these tracks and anything else generated by AI most likely aren't copyrightable in the first place. To quote the Copyrightable Authorship: What Can Be Registered, chapter 306, The Human Authorship Requirement, "The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being."
Australia, the EU, and various other countries agree, no human author means no copyright. AIVA, according to their ToS section 12, Governing Laws, operates under Luxembourg jurisdiction, so that would put them in the realm of AI generated content lacks the originality of an "author's own intellectual creation" and therefore not copyrightable.
That's not to say everyone agrees. Some places take the stance that the copyright should be assigned to the person who causes the work to be created, best summed up by section 9(3) of the UK's CDPA.
In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
Yes, that is as ambiguous as it sounds. Is the person making the "arrangements" the coders that made the underlying software, the data scientists that trained the model, the developers that built the page, the company that owns the site, or the user that configured a few widgets and clicked a button? All of them and more could claim to be doing the arranging.
Bottom line, in the case of this site, as far as most people are going to use the service, there don't seem to be any major problems. Generate your music, use it in your content (videos, games, etc), and don't forget to give AIVA their attribution credit and there shouldn't be any issues.
Anyway, thanks for another great article and for giving me a tangent to procrastinate over instead of doing actual work. :P
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
I enjoy the licensing / privacy / terms write ups you do - you need to stop adding them as comments on my posts and write an actual post with them though as they are really interesting and useful information! 🤣🤣
For me I wasn't even going to take any risks, if I wanted the tracks I would go tier 3 license where I own the copyright, at which point from what I could see they renounce all claim to the piece. I tend to pay around $10-$20 a track anyway, so if I generate more than 3 tracks a month I am better off (assuming they keep improving the quality).
You touched on a point I was questioning which was how copyright works with AI generated pieces anyway, I bet that will be really interesting in the future when the lawsuits start piling up to see where the law lands on ownership (and for example if I generate a track and then edit it, who is deemed as the creator at that point).
I think I will keep playing on the free tier, if I get 50 tracks I think are good enough then I will cough up the money (as stupidly they let you generate as many tracks as you want and only charge for downloads...pretty sure their cost is in the generation part and CPU cycles!)
I've got half a dozen articles in various stages of completeness, just can't seem to ever get around to finishing them. Writing these comments at least helps work out what I would want to say in any article. Either way, I appreciate the encouragement. :)
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Very interesting and they sound as good or better than many royalty free tracks I've heard. The site felt kind of shady at first due to them hiding their terms of use away, but after finding and reading it, there doesn't seem to be any major red flags. Will have to chalk the hiding of it up to bad site design.
The free tier license is a little badly worded in my opinion and it would have been better if they had used something like CC-BY-NC instead of trying to roll their own.
In simple terms, AIVA keeps the copyright on the tracks and gives you a non-commercial license to use the tracks as long as you provide attribution. That's pretty normal, but the "not promoting any commercial activity in any way" is a little aggressive in my opinion and raises the annoying question of whether "promoting" your patreon or similar donation mechanisms counts as "commercial activity". Overall, not a major issue, but an annoying one none the less.
It gets slightly more confused if one includes the ToS section on the matter:
Note the term "non-transferrable". This means that the person who creates the track on AIVA is allowed to "use, modify and distribute" the track, however anyone who receives a copy of the track does not have those rights transferred to them. In other words, InHu has the right to distribute the tracks here, but if I download the tracks I don't have the right to use the track, modify it, or distribute it further to other people. This is not surprising, the purpose of the site is to generate tracks for use in content, not for generating tracks as content.
Again, this isn't a major issue, but overall the information is vague, badly worded, and spread across multiple pages. That isn't how licensing information should be handled; everything should be clear, concise, and located together.
The topic gets even more interesting when you consider the Monkey Selfie precedent and realize these tracks and anything else generated by AI most likely aren't copyrightable in the first place. To quote the Copyrightable Authorship: What Can Be Registered, chapter 306, The Human Authorship Requirement, "The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being."
Australia, the EU, and various other countries agree, no human author means no copyright. AIVA, according to their ToS section 12, Governing Laws, operates under Luxembourg jurisdiction, so that would put them in the realm of AI generated content lacks the originality of an "author's own intellectual creation" and therefore not copyrightable.
That's not to say everyone agrees. Some places take the stance that the copyright should be assigned to the person who causes the work to be created, best summed up by section 9(3) of the UK's CDPA.
Yes, that is as ambiguous as it sounds. Is the person making the "arrangements" the coders that made the underlying software, the data scientists that trained the model, the developers that built the page, the company that owns the site, or the user that configured a few widgets and clicked a button? All of them and more could claim to be doing the arranging.
Bottom line, in the case of this site, as far as most people are going to use the service, there don't seem to be any major problems. Generate your music, use it in your content (videos, games, etc), and don't forget to give AIVA their attribution credit and there shouldn't be any issues.
Anyway, thanks for another great article and for giving me a tangent to procrastinate over instead of doing actual work. :P
I enjoy the licensing / privacy / terms write ups you do - you need to stop adding them as comments on my posts and write an actual post with them though as they are really interesting and useful information! 🤣🤣
For me I wasn't even going to take any risks, if I wanted the tracks I would go tier 3 license where I own the copyright, at which point from what I could see they renounce all claim to the piece. I tend to pay around $10-$20 a track anyway, so if I generate more than 3 tracks a month I am better off (assuming they keep improving the quality).
You touched on a point I was questioning which was how copyright works with AI generated pieces anyway, I bet that will be really interesting in the future when the lawsuits start piling up to see where the law lands on ownership (and for example if I generate a track and then edit it, who is deemed as the creator at that point).
I think I will keep playing on the free tier, if I get 50 tracks I think are good enough then I will cough up the money (as stupidly they let you generate as many tracks as you want and only charge for downloads...pretty sure their cost is in the generation part and CPU cycles!)
I've got half a dozen articles in various stages of completeness, just can't seem to ever get around to finishing them. Writing these comments at least helps work out what I would want to say in any article. Either way, I appreciate the encouragement. :)