The three major music companies filed lawsuits against music artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio on Monday, alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted recordings “on an almost unimaginable scale.” The lawsuits, spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), arrive four days after Advertising sign first reported the news that the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two start-ups.
Filed by plaintiffs that include Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio illegally copied the labels' recordings to train their artificial intelligence models to produce music that could “fill the market with machine-generated content. which will directly compete with, diminish and ultimately drown out the original recordings in which [the services were] built.”
“Construction and operation [these services] it requires copying and ingesting massive amounts of data in the first place to 'train' a software 'model' to produce results,” the major label lawyers explain. “For [these services]this process involved copying decades of the world's most popular recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] produce outputs that mimic the properties of genuine human recordings'.
“Since the day it was launched, Udio has violated the rights of copyright holders in the music industry as part of a maddened effort to become the dominant AI music production service,” the lawsuit against Udio states. “Neither Udio, nor any other artificial intelligence company, can be allowed to advance this goal by infringing on the rights of copyright holders.”
The suit seeks both an injunction to prevent the companies from continuing to train on the copyrighted songs, and damages for infringements that have already taken place. Neither Suno nor Udio immediately returned requests for comment on Monday.
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most advanced and influential players in the emerging field of music artificial intelligence. While many competitors only create instruments or lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio can create all three at the push of a button with stunning accuracy. Udio has already produced what could be considered the first AI-generated hit song with the Drake diss track “BBL Drizzy,” which was created on the platform by comedian King Vilonius and made popular by a Metro Boomin remix. Suno has also seen early success since launching in December 2023, raising $125 million in funding from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies declined to comment on whether unlicensed copyrights were part of their datasets. In a previous interview with Advertising sign, Udio co-founder David Ding said simply that the company was trained in “good music.” However, in a series of articles on Music Business Worldwidefounder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained; Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to create music from Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This goes for melody, chords, style and lyrics,” he wrote.
The complaints against the two companies also allege that copyrighted material was used to train those models. Some of the circumstantial evidence cited in the lawsuits includes songs by 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 outings 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” by Green Day, and more.
In a recent Rolling rock profile of Suno, investor Antonio Rodriguez he admitted that the start-up doesn't have licenses for any of the music he's trained on, but added that he wasn't concerned. Knowing that labels and publishers could sue was just 'the risk we had to take when we invested in the company because we're the fat wallet that's going to get sued right behind these guys… Honestly, if we had label deals when this company I started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it. I think they should have made this product without limitations.”
Many AI companies 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. 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.
Anticipating this defense by Suno and Udio, lawyers for the major labels argue that “[Suno and Udio] cannot avoid responsibility for [their] willful copyright infringement with a claim of fair use. The fair use doctrine promotes human expression by allowing unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but [the services] special offer[r] imitative machine-generated music – not human creativity or expression.”
News of the complaints filed against Suno and Udio follows an earlier lawsuit that also involved using copyrighted material to train models without a license. Filed by UMG, Concord and ABKCO in October against Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence company, this case focused more specifically on copied lyrics.
In a statement about the lawsuits, RIAA CEO and president Mitch Glazer says, “The music community has embraced AI, and we're already partnering and working with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered around human creativity that empower artists and songwriters. But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it's “fair” to copy an artist's life's work and exploit it for their own profit without their consent or without paying the promise of truly innovative AI for all of us”.
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow adds, “These are simple cases of copyright infringement involving unauthorized copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are trying to hide the full extent of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and legal footing. These lawsuits are necessary to strengthen the most basic rules for the responsible, ethical and legal development of productive AI systems and to end Suno and Udio's flagrant infringement.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/major-label-lawsuit-ai-firms-suno-udio-copyright-infringement/
