CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Post Parton: Cloning Dolly

Dolly isn’t dead much more than a week and the tribute songs are pouring in. Some of these are lofted by earthly voices that hymn the departed, now safely in heaven. Others are ethereal, not haunting the Great Smoky Mountains where Dolly Parton was born, raised and got her music, but piped into the endlessly echoing cathedral of the internet from artificially intelligent ghouls headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The cauldron at this virtual witches’ sabbath is called Suno. The brew has been steaming away since the platform’s release in 2023, its fumes haunting music and musicians, the warlocks of this AI music creation corporation robbing the dead and seducing the living with their dark arts.

Masses of money are at stake. In 2024 the Recording Industry Association of America filed a copyright infringement suit against Suno, Inc. The dispute has not yet been settled, though the plaintiffs did come to an agreement with Warner Music Group, one of the three massive conglomerates ruling the music world.

Then a few days ago the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and three musician colleagues filed suit against Suno in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, seeking redress not just for copyright infringement but pursuing a novel strategy that alleges illegal imitation of their voices and style.

Before the advent of copyright, musicians rummaged unabashedly in the vast musical lost-and-found, helping themselves to the goods not just for reasons of expediency but as a vital form of their training and often as a sincere and accepted expression of respect through emulation. At the top of the long list of canny opportunists stands Handel. He stole countless themes from long-dead predecessors and successful—and occasionally aggrieved—contemporaries. He may not have been the best at coming up with melodies, but no one was better at elaborating them. In musical terms, he paid back his debts with interest. The world was and is better for it. Handel was too. He died a rich man.

Handel emigrated from the continent to London in 1710, the same year that the British Parliament passed the Statute of Anne establishing copyright for printed texts. But it was more than a half-century before the King’s Bench (now the High Court) extended the concept to music in the landmark case of Bach v. Longman of 1777, also the basis of American jurisprudence on copyright. Thus Handel, among many others, could skirt the issue.

The irony of Bach v. Longman is that, although the publisher Richard........

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