Suno faces a flurry of copyright infringement lawsuits
By Ahmad Hathout
The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is suing a generative AI company for allegedly training its music creation tool with copyrighted songs without a licence.
The non-profit performance rights organization that collects royalties on behalf of artists is alleging in a new Federal Court lawsuit Wednesday that Massachusetts-based Suno Inc. trains its AI model on “all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the Internet, without permission or licences to do so.”
The user enters a prompt, and the model, the copyright lawsuit claims, spits out “near-professional-quality musical outputs, essentially instantaneously, in response to user prompts,” which are “identical or substantially similar to those works.” The outputs are then made available for streaming on its platform and can be shared on others.
“This case is about a simple principle: technological innovation does not displace copyright,” claims the lawsuit, which uses sheet music notes for comparison. “Suno’s entry into the music industry may be powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), but the foundation its technology is built on – the work of human authors – is protected by copyright. The laws that protect music creators and music publishers apply equally in the age of generative AI.”
Suno, which launched in 2023, has a free plan and paid plans. According to the website, Suno owns the outputs generated by free users, who cannot use them for commercial purposes. Paying users have commercial rights to the songs to monetize them. Still, Suno notes that, in both cases, the “material may not be eligible for copyright protection.”
“In the US, copyright laws protect material created by a human,” the website says. “Music made 100% with AI would not qualify for copyright protection because a human did not write the lyrics or the music. Writing the prompt does not constitute the creation of the song.
“If you wrote the lyrics for your song(s), you own those lyrics. Most copyright offices will allow you to register those lyrics on their own, and you may be able to use those lyrics to register your whole song as well,” the website continues. “Some regions/registrars may recognize you as the writer of the song and Suno as an instrument to help you create the song. If this happens, the song will likely be eligible for copyright protection.”
SOCAN further alleges that Suno’s recently-introduced guardrails to address copyright infringement concerns have not stopped this activity.
In an August blog post, Suno addressed the copyright issue directly: “AI should help people create something new, not imitate someone else’s work,” it said. “We use training strategies we call Original Creation, By Design to reduce the risk of unauthorized reproductions. For example, we intentionally chose not to use artist names in our training metadata because our goal is to help people create original songs – not music that sounds like existing artists.
“Unlike many AI music platforms, we’ve never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs,” it continued. “Instead, when a prompt references a specific artist, we remove the artist’s name and redirect the request toward descriptive musical characteristics. We also work with Audible Magic, Musixmatch and other third party technology providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential unauthorized use of artists’ work.”
Suno did not respond to a request for comment.
“SOCAN has a responsibility to act when the rights of music creators and publishers are put at risk,” SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown said in a press release. “The evidence shows that the Suno platform has generated and streamed outputs that copy works in our repertoire, and that cannot go unchallenged. Innovation can’t come at the expense of human creativity. The future of music must belong to the people who make it.”
SOCAN notes Suno generates an estimated seven million outputs per day, has two million paid users, collects US $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and its latest funding round in June raised the company’s value to US $5.4 billion.
“From the outset, Suno has intentionally built its business on the backs of music creators, music publishers, and other rightsholders,” the lawsuit claims. “It has known at all material times that SOCAN Works have substantial value and that a licence is required to use them.”
SOCAN is seeking an order restraining Suno from the alleged infringing activities, as well as punitive and exemplary damages.
The lawsuit comes one month after SOCAN announced a collaboration with Musical AI, a Canadian rights management technology company offering consent management and attribution infrastructure for generative music. And it follows a day after SOCAN announced that it had completed the acquisition of CMRRA, a music licensing and royalty collection agency representing music rights holders.
On Monday, American musicians, including Grammy winners, filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Suno alleging similarly: “Suno built and trained a model to index musicians by name. It encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit.”
That same day, Gerencia, a California-based independent record label, music publisher, booking agency and management company, also filed suit against Suno.
“Publicly available sources also confirm that Suno accessed these works from licensed streaming services (like Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud) and paywalled platforms (e.g. Tidal) by scraping and circumventing technological access controls—in part through the use of tools and services supplied by Defendant Bright Data (as further defined below more specifically),” Gerencia claims in its filing. “Gerencia never authorized any Defendant to copy, reproduce, or otherwise use its copyrighted works for AI training or any other purpose.”
Also last month, American independent music publisher Round Hill Music filed a similar suit against Suno. “Suno took these copyrighted musical works and/or sound recordings embodying them and trained its AI model so that its users, which number over ten million, can create sound recordings based upon prompts. Suno operates on a “freemium” model allowing some free access, but charges users monthly subscription fees to fully use its platform, which produces AI-generated music files designed to mimic human-made songs,” Round Hill Music claims in its filing.
In late July, a German court found Suno infringed copyright by training its AI model on six well-known songs of Germany’s preforming rights organization GEMA and allowing for their reproduction. GEMA also obtained judgment against ChatGPT maker OpenAI from the same court last year for using song lyrics without a licence when training its models.
Earlier this year, a trio of Canadian writers filed a proposed class action proceeding against Google in Federal Court for allegedly using unlicensed copyrighted works to train and develop its generative AI tools.
In the United States, news and magazine publishers – including Fox, The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, The LA Times, Vox, and even Torstar – filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Canada’s Cohere, alleging the company’s models spit out infringing summaries of their work.
Photo via Suno website
