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:

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 fircomments@gmail.com.

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 leadership videos, branded audio, training content, podcasts, content marketing pieces. Every one of these is a potential training data set for someone who wants to clone your voice, your leaders’ voices, and then upload a synthetic version through a low-cost distributor. We’re talking about something that costs $25 to $90 a year. Then they file a claim against your legitimate content before a human ever reviews it.

Neville Hobson: (pause)

Shel Holtz: That means the system is going to see them as the first one to file that claim and assume they are the legitimate copyright holder. Now, Rolling Stone confirmed that this isn’t an isolated case. Paul Bender, Veronica Swift, Grace Mitchell — these are just a few of the artists who have faced the same attack. One musician even ran an experiment he called Operation Clown Dump, uploading fake content under his colleagues’ names across platforms. His success rate was 100%.

So what do communicators need to do? First, audit your public content footprint. Do it now, before an incident forces you to. Know what you’ve published, where it lives, and what revenue or visibility is attached to it. Second — and here’s something that’s new for a lot of communicators — register your copyrights. Formal registration is the prerequisite for meaningful legal recourse in the United States. Third, build a rapid response protocol for platform disputes. The organizations that survived these attacks quickest were the ones who knew who to call and knew what to say. And fourth, have this conversation with your legal team today, not after something goes wrong.

Murphy Campbell eventually got Vydia to withdraw its claims, but only after her story went viral. Most organizations won’t have that option. Your story won’t go viral. The bad actor doesn’t need to win permanently — they just need the automated system to act before you do. And that is the lesson, and it’s one we’d better learn from musicians before we have to learn it the hard way.

Neville Hobson: Extraordinary, isn’t it, Shel? I guess you could call it a new phenomenon, only in the sense of the speed with which this can be done. I must admit, I’m astonished that the system is such that the first person to file the copyright claim is assigned ownership. Maybe that’s similar here in the UK — every jurisdiction is different, of course — but that’s rather unsettling. It obviously goes back to a time when people weren’t exploiting the syste...