Major Labels Sue SUNO and UDIO AI

[Music1234]

Full Press Release Here: https://www.riaa.com/

 

7. Defendant Suno, Inc. is the company behind Suno AI, or simply Suno, a generative
AI service that creates digital music files within seconds of receiving a user’s prompts. 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.

8. Given that the foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound
recordings without permission, Suno has been deliberately evasive about what exactly it has copied. This is unsurprising. After all, to answer that question honestly would be to admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale. Suno’s executives instead speak publicly in exceedingly general terms. For example, one of Suno’s co-founders posted online that Suno’s service trains on a “mix of proprietary and public data,” while another co-founder stated that Suno’s training practices are “fairly in line with what other people are doing.”

Piercing the veil of secrecy, an early investor admitted that “if [Suno] had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product
without the constraints.”

9. Of course, it is obvious what Suno’s service is trained on. Suno copied Plaintiffs’
copyrighted sound recordings en masse and ingested them into its AI model. Suno’s product can only work the way it does by copying vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across every genre, style, and era. The copyrights in many of those sound recordings are owned or exclusively controlled by Plaintiffs. In other words, 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. Suno’s service trains on the expressive features of these copyrighted sound recordings for the ultimate purpose of poaching the listeners, fans, and potential licensees of the sound recordings it copied.

[Art Munson]

bump

[Tbone]

This is what I think many of us expected to happen at some point, and it will be hugely important for us. I’ll be following it closely.

[Author]

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