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Sony and Universal Sue Suno Over New AI Model
Confirmed
In Short: Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have filed a lawsuit against Suno, alleging the company's new AI model still infringes on their copyrighted works.
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have filed a lawsuit against Suno, alleging the company's new AI model still infringes on their copyrighted works. The lawsuit, filed on September 18, adds over 61,000 new songs to the dispute.
Suno’s attorneys have argued that since nobody was paying for AI training data, no such market exists. However, the labels claim that Suno’s deals with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe reflect an admission that a market for licensing exists.
The lawsuit centers on the question of AI training, where millions of existing works are used to 'train' models to create new ones. Suno’s new model, v6, launched on September 9, is accused of being built on the outputs of earlier models trained on Universal and Sony recordings.
UMG and Sony argue that even if v6 was trained from scratch, it still relies on data derived from earlier models that used their recordings. They claim this laundering of value from the copied recordings into the new models constitutes infringement.
Suno’s Chief Product Officer, Jack Brody, told MBW that v6 was trained entirely from scratch, but the labels argue that this does not eliminate Suno’s liability. The complaint states that training a new model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it merely passes the value of the plaintiffs’ expression into the new models.
What's confirmed
- Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have sued Suno for a second time.
What's still developing
- In a scathing new lawsuit filed Friday (Sept. 18), the two largest players in that industry told Suno they had no interest in doing so.
- It also cited Shulman’s infamous quip that most people don’t actually “enjoy” making music.
- Much of the purpose of filing the new lawsuit was to add the thousands of new songs to the accusations against Suno; a judge previously ruled more songs can be added to such disputes, but only in the form of separate lawsuits.
- Instead, UMG and Sony say it was still trained on outputs and “user interactions” from the earlier models, a practice sometimes called using “synthetic data”; Shulman specifically mentioned those “interactions” during his On The Record interview.
- Suno and other AI companies have long argued that they are legally allowed to take millions of works to create their models under fair use, which allows for copyrighted works to be re-used for free in certain circumstances.
- Suno says its new model is a way to "move forward together" with the music business, but UMG and Sony say it's still "trampling" the rights of human artists.
- “Suno’s wholesale theft … threatens the entire music ecosystem and the numerous people it employs,” attorneys for the two majors write.
- “Suno’s entire business is built on a contradiction: it dismisses the human labor of making music as friction to be engineered away, while depending entirely on the recordings that are the product of such labor to build its product in the first place.” UMG, Sony and Warner teamed up to bring a similar copyright lawsuit against Suno in 2024.