It's astonishing to me that some people are so incredibly anti-AI that they will side with the RIAA of all organizations. People who are fine with piracy now start acting as if copyright and IP are the most important things ever.
Your dislike of the RIAA leads you to believe that someone who is critical of this AI song must be siding with them, which is not really correct.
To put this another way: about a year ago the RIAA went after HitPiece, an NFT scam that was trying to sell NFTs of other people's songs. The amount of cognitive dissonance I had when I realized "I am fully in support of the music labels crushing these guys" was immense.
What you need to take away from this is:
- There are no good guys, so blindly buying into one group is a bad idea. And also even the 'bad guys' might be right once or twice. The RIAA is very much the organization that (legally) stole music from musicians, but that doesn't mean they can't be victims of a crime as well.
- Even your principles and priors might need reevaluation in the light of new evidence. Piracy services were empathetic back when the entertainment industry was dead set on not selling their work through the Internet. They stop being as empathetic when they become profitable entities.
[0] The RIAA's argument back then was that this wasn't really noncommercial because you could just go up the value chain to find someone who had benefited. Sure, you weren't selling the song, but the platform you were sharing it on could sell access to you...
This OTOH is taking existing IP, creating a derivative product, and then uploading it to their Spotify profile, for monetary gain. I think most people can make that distinction.
I don’t think you can enforce copyrights on someone sounding like someone else. You obviously can’t claim that it’s Drake, but I’m sure I can release a rap song where I rap like Drake (as many artists already do).
This is a PR stunt, it will never go to court anyway. But if it did, the way to have done this legally would have been the Death Row Records approach when Snoop Dogg left them in 1996. They simply signed a rapper who sounded like Snoop, gave called him Top Dogg, and had him perform guest verses for other label acts. He appears on 2pac's "All About U", recorded at a time when both Dr. Dre and Snoop had left the label.
What they *might* be is protected by other laws. The closest case the US has seen is this Bette Midler one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
But the circumstances there make it different from a lot of AI voice work since in her case there could be no claim that sounding like her was a coincidence since Ford had an impersonator sing one of her songs (which they did properly secure copyright to use).
People who refuse a position because they've found themselves with strange bedfellows are one of the primary reasons things are so fucked these days.