Sony, Universal sue AI music generator Suno over copyright infringement
What's the story
Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group (UMG) have filed a lawsuit against AI music-generation company Suno. The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The two music giants allege that Suno's new model, backed by several other music companies, still infringes upon their copyrighted works.
Legal argument
'V6 is not a fresh start,' labels argued
The lawsuit claims that Suno's new "v6" family of models was trained on the outputs of its previous models.
This, the plaintiffs argue, suggests that despite Suno's claims of non-infringement, "training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it."
The labels further argued, "V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree."
Company statement
Claims 'fundamentally flawed': Suno's spokesperson
A spokesperson for Suno has dismissed the labels' claims as "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law."
The representative said that their platform extracts "musical qualities" when a user enters an artist's name, not to imitate someone else's work but to help people learn music and create something original.
Model development
v6 developed in collaboration with Warner Music Group, BMG
The spokesperson further explained that the v6 model was developed in collaboration with Warner Music Group (WMG), BMG, and Believe.
It was trained on content licensed from these partners, user interactions including creations and preference signals from their community, as well as the learnings of their team.
The company is looking forward to a future where AI and the music industry can create new product experiences for artists and fans.
Data sourcing
Labels argue new suit shows market for licensing their work
Suno has admitted to scraping data from publicly available sources such as YouTube and Deezer.
However, company executives have claimed that their training metadata doesn't include artists' names, can't replicate material it was trained on, and that Suno is working on improving impersonation detection.
Despite these claims, the labels argue in their new suit that these deals show an admission by Suno of a market for licensing labels' work.
Infringement claims
Alleged infringement of over 60,000 recordings
The lawsuit also specifies that since its debut, Suno has allegedly infringed on 60,202 recordings owned by Sony Music and UMG.
This number is just a fraction of the total works violated, according to the labels.
The new models are partly based on user outputs from those former models, which they say still violate their copyrighted works.
Legal demands
Labels seek statutory damages, attorneys' fees from Suno
The labels have asked the court to declare that Suno has infringed upon their works, award them statutory damages, and make Suno pay their attorneys' fees.
The complaint said, "The harm Suno is causing goes far beyond these immediate economic consequences."
It added that "Suno's wholesale theft of the Copyrighted Recordings threatens the entire music ecosystem and the numerous people it employs."