Last week, on the 24th April, we hosted an incredible event at our London office in the Shard, a celebration marrying World IP Day, which took place on the 26th April, with our 115-year anniversary.
IP and Music: Feel the Beat of IP
As a firm committed to encouraging and protecting the expression of people’s ideas, we embraced this year’s theme for the 2025 World Intellectual Property Day campaign for our event: “IP and Music: Feel the Beat of IP.” Intellectual property underpins the very core of creativity, allowing ideas to blossom and people’s success to be sufficiently acknowledged – and music is an industry governed by creativity.
Patents are filed for innovative music tech, such as musical instruments or algorithms for generating or modifying music. Trademark registration protects branding, as applied for example to album covers or merchandise, to distinguish one artist from another. And, of course, music itself is an intellectual property asset, gaining copyright and allied rights once it is recorded in some material form.
To explore how intellectual property shapes, protects, and even inspires creative expression in music, we ran a panel discussion, led by Senior Partner Paul Cozens, where our panellists shared their fascinating experience and knowledge.
We heard from: Drew Ellis, Grammy-nominated graphic designer and photographer who created some of the most iconic album covers of all time; Dr Mark Gotham, whose work spans musical composition and computer science; Prof Simon Godsill, who is professor of Statistical Signal Processing in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University; and James St. Ville KC, who is a barrister with a significant music background.
We also invited two of our own attorneys to the panel, Emma Pallister, Chartered trademark attorney, and Dani Kramer, UK & European patent attorney and UK design attorney.
AI: for good or for evil?
Although music has been a universal language since before the 1st century AD (the earliest fragment of musical notation was found on a 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablet), the industry is always undergoing change. The last 100 years has seen the most significant transformation with the conception of pop music and the use of electronics. Now the rise of AI begs the difficult questions: what determines music individuality? What makes music, or anything, human? And can intellectual property law balance protection and creative freedom?
At Mathys & Squire, we have many attorneys who specialise in AI and the complex range of implications for managing intellectual property which arise as a result. These span from the extent to which inventors can protect their AI-related inventions to how creations can be protected from unsolicited use by AI or for AI training. Our panellists discussed the broad implications of AI for the music industry and how they can be approached by intellectual property law.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal”
Although this was once said by Picasso, he may have thought differently had he known about AI. AI has transformed the traditional methods of obtaining information. Machine learning models mine information by web scraping huge quantities of data, which trains them to satisfy almost any request. But such capabilities present elaborate legal challenges, as information from human creators is often used without permission.
For example, AI can produce a piece of music almost instantaneously, drawing on sources of existing music to meet user prompts. Last year in the US, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Records sued an AI model called Suno which creates music described as “original” by the platform. These record companies claimed that the model re-created elements from recordings which they owned, infringing their copyright.
Infringement or inspiration?
A musical composition is an intricate tapestry of external influences. As Dr Mark Gotham illustrated during the panel discussion with his piano rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon (from the 1600s) and Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ (which builds on the same chord progression like many other recent pop songs), music composition often uses well-known phrases. Therefore, evaluating whether one composition infringes the copyright in another is complicated by the fact that they may both contain references to even earlier works.
But does the popular proverb “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” still stand when it comes to AI-generated music? According to Damon Albarn, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush and a host of other artists, it does not. These musicians, among others, released an album on 25th February titled “Is this what we want” in protest at a proposed change in UK copyright law relating to AI. A similar sentiment was seen in the House of Lords, when the Peers voted for amendments to the UK Government’s Data (Use and Access) Bill, which were suggested by film director and peer, Baroness Beeban Tania Kidron. The amendments were proposed with the aim of protecting the intellectual property of creatives, ensuring that they are made aware how and when their work is used.
If AI-generated music is indeed an original work, another question follows: who owns it? But this is also a contentious topic, as the list of possible authors is long: the designer of the AI model, the individuals in charge of training the model, the individuals whose work is used to train the model or the individual who inputs prompts into the machine. Furthermore, musical creations consist of many different elements, including the lyrics, the melody and the beat. Licensing arrangements for music are already multi-faceted and, when AI is thrown into the mix, it becomes even more complicated. Copyright law cannot accommodate something which has no clear owner.
The patentability of AI
In addition, AI raises questions about the criteria for patent filing. For an invention to be patentable in the UK, it must: be novel, display an inventive step (i.e. not be obvious to a person skilled in the field), have an industrial application, and solve a technical problem. Pure mathematical method (and hence, sometimes “pure AI”) inventions are not patentable because they lack technical character, and merely specifying the technical nature of the parameters may not be sufficient on its own to remedy this. For an AI invention to be patentable it must have either a technical application or a technical implementation.
In practice, this means that unless the invention is a specific technical implementation of a machine learning algorithm that is particularly adapted to consider the internal functioning of a computer system or network it may be very hard to patent in this space. An argument that the provision of better music is a technical application would be unlikely to be met with success.
A new creative force
Paul Cozens ended the insightful panel discussion with a deciding question. Ultimately, all the panellists agreed that AI can be harnessed as a creative force rather than destroying creativity as whole. However, this is only possible if IP systems develop fast enough to accommodate all the issues which come with it.
In December of last year, the government published a consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. The consultation presented a framework which would prioritise transparency, requiring AI developers to disclose the material used for training, and allow creators to reserve the rights of their work, opting out from use for data mining.
Just last week, a collective license was put forward by The Copyright Licensing Agency which would enable authors to receive remuneration when their content is used to train AI. The CLA portrayed this as a more viable alternative to the government’s current proposals.
We can stay hopeful that the government is able to develop a legal system which rewards rights holders and gives them control over their work, whilst also supporting the development of AI models by allowing access to high-quality data.
115 years of protecting creativity
World IP Day was also the perfect opportunity to celebrate our firm having been at the forefront of intellectual property law for 115 years. The event showcased our dedication as a firm to align our deep expertise with the cutting-edge of technology, as well as foster a culture of creativity and innovation.
Albert William Mathys founded Mathys & Co. in 1910 with a vision to protect the influx of revolutionary inventions in science, engineering and manufacturing at the start of the second Industrial Revolution. Our firm began in a small office in Chancery Lane, and has flourished into a global IP powerhouse, with hubs across Europe, China and Japan, adapting to every complex change in the legal landscape as we grew.
From protecting internal combustion engines in the early twentieth century to working with AI and life-changing biotech in the present day, we are proud to have 115 years behind us of combining technical knowledge with entrepreneurial spirit and a commitment to immaculate client service, and many more to come.
Below is a recording of the panel discussion for a deeper insight into the fascinating intersection between music and intellectual property.
