When most tech companies are sued, the expected defense is to deny any wrongdoing — that is, to provide a rational explanation for why the company’s actions don’t violate the law. Music AI startups Udio and Suno are taking a different approach: They simply admit to the conduct they’re accused of.
Udio and Suno were sued in June, alleging that music labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group scraped copyrighted material from the internet to train their AI models. Filing Today, Suno acknowledged that its neural networks are indeed scraping copyrighted material: “It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings on which Suno’s models were trained likely included recordings in which the plaintiffs in this lawsuit own the rights,” and that’s because its training data “includes essentially every music file of reasonable quality accessible on the open internet,” likely including millions of pirated songs.
But the company maintains that scraping falls within the scope of fair use: “Making copies of protected works as part of a back-end technical process, invisible to the public, to create new products that ultimately do not infringe copyright, is a fair use under copyright law,” the statement read. The company’s argument seems to be that the AI-generated tracks it creates don’t contain samples, so illegally acquiring all of those tracks to train its AI models isn’t an issue.
The RIAA, which filed the lawsuit, unsurprisingly responded harshly to the allegations, calling the defendants’ actions “evasive and misleading.” “Their industrial-scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use.’ It’s not fair to steal an artist’s life’s work, extract its core value, and repackage it to compete directly with the original,” a spokesperson for the group said. “The defendants had a legitimate means of marketing their products and tools to the marketplace – by getting consent before using the work, as many of their competitors already do. This unfair competition is the direct issue at issue in these lawsuits.”
Whatever the next phase of this lawsuit is, get your popcorn ready: it’s bound to be wild.
