Lawyers for the tech giant argued that while the independent musicians' claims of being fed into the Lyria 3 model are entirely baseless, users also granted Google explicit permission to do it anyway.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Formally requesting the dismissal of a copyright lawsuit brought by a coalition of independent musicians, Google filed a motion in federal court on Tuesday arguing that the company holds a perpetual, royalty-free license to the precise massive-scale AI ingestion that it maintains definitely did not occur.
The lawsuit alleges that Google illegally scraped thousands of user-uploaded YouTube videos to train its Lyria 3 music generation model. In its motion to dismiss, Google’s legal team characterized the musicians’ accusation as a completely "unsupported hypothesis," while simultaneously entering into evidence a sweeping Terms of Service agreement proving the company was legally entitled to execute the hypothesis flawlessly across its global server network.
The plaintiffs' claim that we specifically targeted their uploaded works to train our AI model is a complete and utter fiction. And as we have clearly demonstrated to the presiding judge, it is a fiction that they fully authorized us to carry out when they checked a box to upload their acoustic guitar covers in 2014.
The 40-page motion goes on to explain that when musicians click the standard "Upload" button on YouTube, they grant Google a "broad license" to distribute, modify, and algorithmically digest their life's work into a synthetic audio paste capable of generating a flawless, royalty-free pop jingle in seconds. The company vehemently maintains that it would never dream of actually initiating this process, despite having built a multibillion-dollar data infrastructure specifically designed for that exact purpose.
Google's filing concluded by noting that if the judge does not dismiss the case on the grounds of the non-existent training being perfectly legal, the company may be forced to invoke a previously unnoticed 2019 addendum to the YouTube user agreement, which grants the tech giant outright physical ownership of the plaintiffs' instruments.