FIR #509: Does Corporate Content Need Copyright Protection?

When bad actors use AI tools to clone a musician’s voice and upload synthetic versions of their songs, they can then file copyright claims against the original artist’s content — and win, at least initially. That’s because the systems platforms used to validate copyright claims are automated and configured to treat whoever files first as the rightful holder. The result: musicians like Murphy Campbell, a folk artist from North Carolina, lose both revenue and control of their own creative identity. The same mechanism works just as well against any organization that publishes audio or video content online. In this midweek episode, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson break down how the scam works, why it matters to communicators, and what you should be doing right now — before an incident forces your hand. Links from this episode: AI Cloned Her Voice, Then Claimed Her Songs‘This Is Not Me’: Inside the AI Scams Driving Musicians CrazyA Folk Musician Became a Target for AI Fakes and a Copyright TrollA traditional musician became a victim of AI imitations and a copyright aggressor‘AI slop’: Emily Portman and musicians on the mystery of fraudsters releasing songs in their name The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, April 27. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [e-mail]. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript Neville Hobson: Hi everyone and welcome to For Immediate Release, this is episode 509. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. And today we’re going to talk about something else that communicators need to worry about. I think we need to develop a worry list for communicators. This one starts with a tale about a folk singer from the mountains of Western North Carolina. She’s named Murphy Campbell. She plays banjo and dulcimer and records old Appalachian ballads, some of them written by her own distant relatives. And she posts videos of herself performing in the woods. She has about 7,800 monthly listeners on Spotify. And she is, as Shelly Palmer put it in a recent column, exactly the kind of artist the copyright system was designed to protect. In January, some of her fans started messaging her about songs on her Spotify profile that she had never uploaded. Someone would have taken her YouTube performances, run them through AI voice cloning tools, and posted synthetic versions of her songs under her name on streaming platforms. These fake tracks, to put not too fine a point on it, were really bad. Her dulcimer sounded like — and these were her words — a warbled metallic mess. Her voice had been deepened and auto-tuned into what she called a bro country singer. But here’s where it gets interesting for those of us in communications, because that’s not the end of the story. It didn’t stop at impersonation. Whoever uploaded the fakes through a legitimate music distributor called Vydia (V-Y-D-I-A) then filed copyright claims against Campbell’s original YouTube videos — the very videos the AI had been trained on. Because YouTube doesn’t use humans to review initial copyright claims, Campbell stopped earning revenue on her own content. That revenue started going to the person who had filed the copyright claims. She described herself as being in a weird limbo where “I’m telling robots to take down music that robots made.” Shelly Palmer called this a reverse copyright scam, and he confirmed, speaking to other content creators off the record, that this is more common than he might have believed. Now, I know what you’re thinking — music streaming platforms, artists, what does this have to do with me? And the answer is everything. Because the mechanism that elbowed Murphy Campbell out of earning royalties for her own music will work just as well against any organization that publishes content on platforms with automated enforcement systems. That is virtually every organization that has a YouTube channel, a podcast feed, or any kind of public video or audio presence. So here’s the structural problem as Palmer frames it. The copyright system we have was built on a foundational assumption that the first entity to register a claim is the rightful owner. That assumption held when human creativity was the bottleneck. It breaks completely when AI can generate a synthetic version of any content in seconds using any voice. Think about what your organization puts out there publicly — executive speeches, earnings calls, thought ...