When most tech companies face a lawsuit, the expected defense is to deny fault. Reasonably explaining why the business’s actions do not violate any laws. Music AI startups Udio and Suno have taken a different approach: admit to doing what you’re being sued for.
It was Udio and Suno sued In June, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group sued their music labels for training artificial intelligence models by scraping copyrighted material from the Internet. In court giving today, Suno admitted that its neural networks are actually breaking copyrighted material: “It’s no secret that the tens of millions of posts Suno’s model is trained on probably include posts that are copyrighted by the Plaintiffs in this case.” And it includes “all music files of reasonable quality available on the open internet,” including its training data, which probably includes millions of illegal song copies.
But the company takes the line that its scraps fall under the umbrella of fair use. “It is a fair use to make a copy of a copyrighted work invisible to the public as part of a back-end technological process in the service of creating a new product that is not ultimately infringed,” the statement said. His argument seems to be that because the AI-generated tracks he creates do not include samples, it is not a problem to illegally obtain all those tracks to train the AI model.
The RIAA, which filed a lawsuit calling the defendants’ actions “evasive and deceptive,” responded to the filing with a surprisingly harsh response. “Their industry-wide infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use’. There is nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, stripping it of its essential value and repackaging it to directly compete with the originals,” a spokesperson for the organization said. “Defendants had a ready legal way to market their products and tools—as did many of their competitors—by obtaining consent before using their work. This unfair competition is directly at issue in these cases.”
Whatever the next phase of this lawsuit is, get your popcorn ready. It must be wild.
