I want to train a model for a musician based on piano covers they have recorded of popular songs and therefore own, but because of copyright infringement they still pay royalties to the writers of these songs. Curious if this is legal or not – I would presume not since the recordings are not being monetized in this scenario but rather fed into a model, and the recordings are still owned 100% by the musician licensing them to me.
Depends on where you are: in Germany there is no fair use for example. Everything that does not have a permissive licence is illegal.