Music artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio hired elite law firm Latham & Watkins to defend them against lawsuits filed by the big three in late June, according to court documents.
The lawsuits, filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group (UMG), allege that Suno and Udio illegally copied the labels' recordings to train their artificial intelligence models to produce music that could “flood the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, undercut and ultimately drown out the original recordings in which [the services were] built.”
Latham & Watkins has already played a key role in defending leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence. This includes the company's work defending Anthropic against infringement claims brought by UMG, Concord Music Group and ABKCO last October. Latham represents OpenAI in all its lawsuits brought by authors and other rights holders, including the case filed by New York Times and a case filed by comedian Sarah Silverman and other writers.
The Latham team is led by Andrew Gass, Steve Feldman, Sy Damle, Britt Lovejoy and Nate Taylor. Plaintiffs UMG, WMG and Sony Music are represented by Moez Kaba, Maria Rivera, Alexander Perry and Robert Kliger of Hueston Hennigan as well as Daniel Cloherty by Cloherty & Steinberg.
It's common for AI companies to argue that education is protected by the fair use doctrine of copyright — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law — and it's likely that this will become a key part of their defense. Latham for Suno and Udio practices. While fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI companies say it's just as valid for “intermediate” use of millions of projects to build a machine that spits out entirely new creations.
So far, both Suno and Udio have declined to comment on whether or not they have used unlicensed copyright in their datasets. However, the music industry began to question what was in these datasets after a series of articles he wrote Ed Newton-Rexfounder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, were published by Music Business Worldwide. In one of these, Newton-Rex said he was able to create music from both Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music.”
The lawsuit cites circumstantial evidence to support the labels' belief that their copyrighted material has been used by Suno and Udio in AI training. This includes songs from Suno and Udio that sound exactly like the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA. Outputs parroting Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo's producer labels. and outtakes that sound almost identical to Mariah Carey's “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys' “I Get Around,” ABBA's “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations' “My Girl,” “American Idiot” of Green Day and more.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/ai-music-companies-hire-law-firm-defend-label-lawsuits/
