Big Three Record Labels Sue over Alleged AI Music Infringement

A group of music companies including the three major US record labels—Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group— have sued the artificial intelligence (AI) music companies Suno and Udio over alleged copyright infringement of music owned by the labels.

The plaintiffs, according to their complaint against Suno, “own or exclusively control copyrights in a great majority of the most commercially valuable sound recordings in the world.”

As The Verge notes,

The two AI companies, Suno and Udio, use text prompts to churn out original songs. Both companies have enjoyed a level of success: Suno is available for use in Microsoft Copilot though a partnership with the tech giant. Udio was used to create “BBL Drizzy,” one of the more notable examples of AI music going viral.

These AI music companies let users generate music based on genre, topic, etc.

In its latest funding round, Suno reportedly raised $125 million, valuing the company at approximately $500 million. Suno charges users up to $24 per month for its highest subscription tier.

According to the complaint against Suno,

Suno already has over 10,000,000 users generating music files using its product, with some outputs amassing upwards of 2,000,000 streams. These digital music files have been released to the public—some already finding their way onto the major streaming services—and compete with the copyrighted sound recordings that enabled their creation; yet Suno sought no permission from and gives no credit or compensation to the human artists or other rightsholders whose works fueled their creation

The complaint against Suno also states:

From the invention of the phonograph record, through the eras of vinyl, cassette tapes, CDs, and now streaming and social media, the recorded music industry has been at the forefront of technological advancement. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning are the next frontier of technological development, poised to push boundaries and expand commercial opportunity. But with AI’s enormous capabilities comes an equally enormous potential for abuse, making it critical that AI technology be implemented responsibly, ethically, and legally.

As the MIT Technology Review reports,

The music labels claim the companies made use of copyrighted music in their training data “at an almost unimaginable scale,” allowing the AI models to generate songs that “imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”

According to the complaint against Suno,

Building and operating a service like Suno’s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to “train” a software “model” to generate outputs. For Suno specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies into Suno’s AI model so it can generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings. Suno charges many of its users monthly fees to use its product and produce digital music files, which are designed to entertain, evoke emotion, and stoke passion just like the genuine sound recordings Suno copied.

Say the plaintiffs:

AI companies, like all other enterprises, must abide by the laws that protect human creativity and ingenuity. There is nothing that exempts AI technology from copyright law or that excuses AI companies from playing by the rules. This lawsuit seeks to enforce these basic principles.

According to the plaintiffs,

Foundational principles of copyright law dictate that copying protected sound recordings for the purpose of developing an AI product requires permission from rightsholders. Otherwise, such AI offerings will erode the value of the artistic works that comprise the essential raw materials that allow them to function in the first place. If left unmoored from existing and longstanding legal constraints, such products could supplant, rather than support, genuine human creativity.

The plaintiffs accuse Suno of being “evasive” about what exactly it copied.

The plaintiffs say that it’s “obvious” that “Suno copied Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings en masse and ingested them into its AI model” because

if Suno had taken efforts to avoid copying Plaintiffs’ sound recordings and ingesting them into its AI model, Suno’s service would not be able to reproduce the convincing imitations of such a vast range of human musical expression at the quality that Suno touts.

The plaintiffs claim that during pre-litigation correspondence, Suno didn’t deny or offer any facts to undermine the plaintiffs’ allegations that Suno had copied the plaintiffs’ music.

Instead, said the plaintiffs, Suno asserted that its training data was “confidential business information.”

(Incidentally, “confidentially” isn’t a defense to copyright infringement.)

Suno also claimed that its copying was within the scope of “fair use” under copyright law.

Noted the plaintiffs, this “was telling because fair use only arises as a defense to an otherwise unauthorized use of a copyrighted work.”

According to the plaintiffs,

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.

As the MIT Technology Review notes,

It will likely take a few years at least before we have legal clarity around copyright law, fair use, and AI training data. But the cases are already ushering in changes. OpenAI has been striking deals with news publishers such as Politico, the Atlantic, Time, the Financial Times, and others, and exchanging publishers’ news archives for money and citations. And YouTube announced in late June that it will offer licensing deals to top record labels in exchange for music for training.

In any case, AI companies can’t just assume that their use of copyrighted training data won’t get them sued – and such lawsuits can be ruinously expensive for startups.

It seems likely that most or all of the major owners of entertainment and journalistic “content” being used to train generative AI (GAI) tools will eventually bring suit against GAI companies or join the lawsuits already in progress, unless they make licensing deals.

We previously reported on a California Federal Court that ruled in favor of a motion to dismiss a case brought by computer programmers who alleged that their work had been used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models to generate code. We also reported that the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming that their generative AI (GAI or GenAI) tools were trained on articles published by the Times without its authorization.