Rights and consent

A service that takes AI-made music and points it at real artists could very easily become a machine for laundering other people’s work. We would rather it were the opposite: a way for an artist to be found and credited because something genuinely sounds like them.

That only holds if the rules are clear and we actually enforce them. These are the rules.

• You own or control the rights in the audio, or you have permission from whoever does.
• You are allowed to share it with us for analysis and matching.
• Anyone who performed on it is happy for it to be here.
• It does not imitate a real, identifiable person's voice without that person's permission.

You confirm this at upload. We take it seriously and so should you — uploading someone else’s work is the fastest way to lose your account, and it is your liability, not ours, if the rights holder comes looking.

Creators are expected to upload AI-made music. That is the point of the service, and there is nothing to apologise for in it. You still need the right to upload what you made:

• Your generator's terms must allow you to use its output this way. Most do. Check yours — some free tiers keep commercial rights back.
• The output must not have been produced by prompting for a specific named artist's voice or a specific existing recording.
• You must not present someone else's recording as your own generated output.

Finding the real artist who genuinely sounds like your track is the service. Faking that artist is not, and a track that does it will be removed.

A voice is the most personal thing a musician has, and the law around cloning it is still catching up with the technology. We are not waiting for it to catch up.

When an artist or producer uploads their work, it seeds the reference library: we analyse it to build the fingerprint that incoming tracks are compared against.

It is never published, never listed publicly, never sold, never shared with anyone outside the matching flow described below, and never used to train machine-learning models — ours or anyone else’s. If we ever wanted to do something else with it, we would ask you first, and you would be free to say no.

Your name stays hidden from a creator until they subscribe. Every request for a file re-checks who is asking and what they are entitled to, on the server, every time.

Any recording, credit, fee, royalty or publishing split that comes out of a match belongs entirely to the people who made it. EchoBack takes no percentage and claims no ownership of anything, ever. See the terms of use for the exact licence you give us, which is limited to running the service.

If something of yours is on EchoBack without your permission, email hello@echoback.world with the subject line “Rights report”. Tell us:

• Which upload it is — a link, or the title and the member's name, or a description precise enough for us to find it.
• What the work is and what your rights in it are: you own it, you performed on it, it is your voice, you are acting for the rights holder.
• Enough evidence for us to take it seriously — a release, a registration, a link to it published elsewhere, or the original files.
• How to reach you, and a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised.

You do not need a lawyer to do this, and there is no form to fill in. An email from the person whose work it is, is enough to start.

• We acknowledge your email within two working days.
• We restrict the upload while we look at it, so it stops matching and stops being audible to anyone.
• We tell the uploader what has been claimed and give them a chance to answer.
• We tell you what we decided and why, normally within ten working days.

If the claim is upheld, the upload and everything derived from it is deleted. If the uploader does not answer, it stays down.

We can get this wrong, and a takedown is a serious thing to have happen to your work. If we removed something you had every right to upload, reply to the message we sent you and say so, with whatever shows the right is yours.

We will look again with fresh eyes, and if we were wrong we will restore the upload, tell you, and say so to the person who reported it. We will not hold a mistaken report against your account.

One upheld report gets the upload removed and a warning. A second gets the account suspended. A third closes it for good, and we do not take payment for a subscription after that point.

Deliberately uploading other people’s work — as opposed to getting a licence wrong — closes an account the first time.

Removing an upload deletes the audio file, its fingerprints, its matching vectors and every match built from it. Deleting your account does the same for everything you have ever uploaded. Neither is reversible, and neither needs you to ask us — both are in your account settings.

The privacy notice sets out exactly what is kept, for how long, and what happens to backups.