AI Music Startup Suno Faces Copyright Infringement Lawsuit from Major Record Labels

Suno and Udio argue training AI on copyrighted music is 'fair use'

Sony, Warner and Universal Music all sued the AI start-ups in June, accusing them of copyright infringement. Suno and Udio, two AI start-ups innovating in the AI-generated music space, have responded to copyright lawsuits brought against them by major record labels, calling them "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law". The start-ups argue that training their AI models on copyrighted music belonging to the record labels to create services that allow anyone to create music constitutes "fair use" under copyright law. "It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product," Suno argued in a court document yesterday (1 August). Background Major record labels Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records filed a lawsuit against Massachusetts-based Suno and New York-based Udio in late June, accusing them of copyright infringement by using music belonging to the records to train their AI systems. Earlier in the year, hundreds of musicians - including Billie Eilish and Katy Perry - signed an open letter calling on developers to stop using AI to "devalue the rights of human artists" and "sabotage creativity". "These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI 'sounds' and 'images' that substantially dilute the royalty pools that are paid out to artists," the letter read, adding that the growth of AI-generated music would be "catastrophic" for many working musicians in the industry that are "just trying to make ends meet". Can music genres be owned? Suno argued in its court responses that the lawsuit brought forward by the Recording Industry Association of America on behalf of major record labels want to "shut" it down because the labels "don't want competition". "They are a collection of the largest record labels in the world, which collectively dominates the music industry ... Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share." Uncharted Labs, which makes Udio AI, argued in its response that the premise of the lawsuit brought against it is "fundamentally wrong" because musical styles such as opera, jazz or rap are not proprietary. "Entire genres of music, the idea goes, are effectively owned by the corporations that acquired rights to recordings made by the generations of musicians who pioneered, developed and honed those styles, each building off of others' innovations and creativity to push the progress of the arts incrementally forward," the company wrote. "What Udio has done - use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyse for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of various musical styles, all to enable people to make their own new creations - is a quintessential 'fair use' under copyright law." In the background of the complaints and lawsuits, Suno and Udio have been raising millions in investment to develop their generative AI technologies. In April, Udio raised $10m in seed funding from a16z, Instagram co-founder Mike Kreiger, and musicians will.i.am and Common. The following month, Suno raised $125m in a round backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

A.I. Music Startup Suno Fires Back at Record Labels, Admits Training on Copyrighted Music

Inside 'A Complete Unknown': How Timothée Chalamet Became Bob Dylan Five weeks after the three major record labels filed filed lawsuits against A.I. music startups Suno and Udio, accusing them of "trampling the rights of copyright owners," Suno fired back Thursday in a legal filing, acknowledging that they trained their music-generating model on copyrighted music -- while insisting that doing so was legal under fair-use doctrine. "What the major record labels really don't want is competition," Suno's attorneys wrote in their answer to the label's complaint. "Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share." (Rolling Stone has reached out to the labels' trade organization, the RIAA, for comment.) Suno allows users to create songs simply by typing descriptions, and in its latest version, also offers the option to have its AI model expand upon uploaded sound files. According to Suno's filing, the company trained its neural network on "tens of millions" of recordings -- all music available on the "open Web," which would include the millions of copyrighted songs available on YouTube and elsewhere. "It is no secret," the filing states, "that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno's model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case." Previously, the company's management and investors had hinted at the use of copyrighted material in the training process, but had not directly confirmed it. In their lawsuit, filed June 25, the labels did not allege that songs generated by Suno violate copyrights -- instead, they zeroed in on the training process behind them. "Foundational principles of copyright law dictate that copying protected sound recordings for the purpose of developing an AI product requires permission from rightsholders," the labels' attorneys wrote. "Suno cannot avoid liability for its willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but Suno offers imitative machine-generated music -- not human creativity or expression." In their response to the complaint, Suno's lawyers call the labels' argument "confusing," and argue that the focus on the training process will "prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims." "It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process," Suno's response states, "invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product. Congress enacted the first copyright law in this country in 1791. In the 233 years since, no case has ever -- not one single time -- reached a contrary conclusion.... The outputs generated by Suno are new sounds, informed precisely by the 'styles, arrangements and tones' of previous ones. They are per se lawful." Suno's response also accuses the labels of "misuse of copyright" to suppress competition, and claims they can win the case on those grounds alone. "With the benefit of discovery, Suno will show that even setting the fair use issue aside, Plaintiffs' pervasive copyright misuse bars their claims altogether," the response states. In a blog post that accompanies the filing, Suno argues that its model learns from previous music the same way human musicians do. It also calls the timing of the labels' lawsuit "somewhat surprising," since the company had been in discussions with major labels about "expanding the pie for music together." "We did so not because we had to," the company writes in the blog post, "but because we believe that the music industry could help us lead this expansion of opportunity for everyone, rather than resisting it. Whether this lawsuit is the result of over-eager lawyers throwing their weight around, or a conscious strategy to gain leverage in our commercial discussions, we believe that this lawsuit is an unnecessary impediment to a larger and more valuable future for music." The battle over training data for generative AI models is a broad and ongoing one. The New York Times, for instance, has sued OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, making near-identical claims to the major labels' suit -- among other arguments, they allege that the process of copying the Times' data to their servers during their training process was a violation of copyright.

AI music startup Suno claims training model on copyrighted music is 'fair use' | TechCrunch

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine. The RIAA filed the lawsuit against Udio and Suno on June 24, alleging that the companies trained their models using copyrighted music. While Suno's investors have previously hinted that the startup didn't have permission from the music labels to use the copyrighted material, it hasn't been so directly stated as it was in today's filing. "It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno's model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case," the filing states. Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman continued on in a blog post published the same day as the legal filing, saying "We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet... Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels." Shulman also argued that training its AI model from data on the "open internet" is no different than a "kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre." "Learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is now now," Shulman added. The RIAA clapped back with this response: "It's a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit. Their industrial scale infringement does not qualify as 'fair use'. There's nothing fair about stealing an artist's life's work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals...Their vision of the 'future of music' is apparently one in which fans will no longer enjoy music by their favorite artists because those artists can no longer earn a living." The question of fair use was never simple, but with AI model training even established doctrine may not be applicable. The outcome of this case, still in its early stages, will likely establish an influential precedent that could define the future of more than just the two startups named in it.

AI startup Suno says music industry is afraid of competition

Why it matters: Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music have alleged that Suno exploits copyrighted sounds and songs without permission to train its AI models to generate new songs. What they're saying: "What the major record labels really don't want is competition," Suno said in a court document filed today. Context: Content creators are trying to coexist with -- and protect their businesses from -- new generative AI businesses that rely on learning from previous bodies of work. Zoom in: Suno admits that training its model from data on the open internet contains copyrighted materials, some of which is owned by major record labels. The big picture: The recording industry has been at this kind of technological juncture before -- when Napster and digital file formats massively disrupted its business models. The record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America didn't immediately respond to Axios' request for comment.

AI Startup Suno Says Music Industry Suit Aims to Stifle Competition

AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music.