Among AI music generators capable of creating entire songs with just a prompt, Suno and Udio are considered by many to be among the best.
They are also considered by many to have used copyrighted music to train their AI models, without authorization.
Now, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is coordinating lawsuits on behalf of major recording companies against the two AI companies.
Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group’s UMG Recordings, and Warner Records Inc. are among the plaintiffs in two new federal copyright infringement lawsuits filed on Monday (June 24).
The lawsuit against Suno was filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, while the lawsuit against Udio was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, over what the RIAA calls “mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by two multi-million-dollar music generation services.”
“AI companies, like all other enterprises, must abide by the laws that protect human creativity and ingenuity,” the complaints against Suno and Udio state. “There is nothing that exempts AI technology from copyright law or that excuses AI companies from playing by the rules.”
That assertion is likely to be the key point of contention in the lawsuits. US courts have not yet ruled that using copyrighted materials to train AI amounts to copyright infringement.
A number of tech companies involved in developing AI tech, including Anthropic and Google, have argued that using copyrighted materials to train AI should be considered a “fair use” exemption to copyright law, as, in some circumstances, it’s permissible to use copyrighted materials in the creation of new technologies or products.
However, music companies and other rights holders argue that this doesn’t apply to generative AI, as this technology can be used to create material that competes directly with the copyrighted material being used. AI music generators are capable of creating songs that compete in the marketplace against the copyrighted songs used to train them.
“When those who develop such [AI music services] steal copyrighted sound recordings, the [services’] synthetic musical outputs could saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which the [services were] built,” the legal complaints state.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge.”
Mitch Glazier, RIAA
In a statement shared with media on Monday, the RIAA asserted that the use of copyrighted songs to train AI music generators fails all four of the tests used by US courts to determine whether the “fair use” exemption applies.
“Fair use is not available when the output seeks to ‘substitute’ for the work copied. And Suno and Udio have, in their own words, conceded that is exactly what they intend,” the RIAA asserted.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement.
“But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together 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 consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
The recording industry trade group also claimed that both Suno and Udio have “admitted” to using copyrighted material to train their AI.
The RIAA cited comments by an early investor in Suno, Antonio Rodriguez, who all but admitted that Suno had used copyrighted materials when he stated that he opposed Suno signing licensing deals with music copyright owners, saying “if [Suno] had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
The group also asserted that comments by Udio executives that their AI had been trained on “a large amount of publicly-available and high-quality music” that was “obtained from the internet” and was the “best quality music that’s out there” is essentially an admission that they used “the copyrighted sound recordings of the RIAA’s member companies.”
The RIAA further asserted that ($125 million-backed) Suno and (Andreessen Horowitz-backed) Udio had been “caught” using copyrighted materials.
“They left producer tags on their output. ‘CashMoneyAP’ and ‘Jason Derulo’ tags are present in Suno’s outputs,” The RIAA stated.
“Users have generated sound-a-likes of numerous sound recordings using Suno and Udio, including The Temptations’ My Girl, Green Day’s American Idiot, Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas, along with recordings by Chuck Berry, James Brown, and others.”
“These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
Ken Doroshow, RIAA
This echoes the forensic analyses of Suno- and Udio-generated music carried out by Ed Newton-Rex, the former head of music at Stability AI, who founded the non-profit ethical AI accreditation organization Fairly Trained.
In an analysis published by MBW, Newton-Rex found striking similarities between music created by Suno and the works of Ed Sheeran, ABBA, Oasis and others. In a separate analysis, he found similarities between Udio-generated music and the works of John Lennon, Natalie Imbruglia, Coldplay and others.
“In addition, in some instances, the defendants’ services produce vocals that are indistinguishable from famous recording artists, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, and ABBA,” the RIAA asserted.
“These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing,” said Ken Doroshow, the RIAA’s chief legal officer.
“These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
The RIAA-led lawsuits against Suno and Udio come after numerous of other lawsuits were launched in the US against AI developers over the past year.
Among them is a lawsuit that includes Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO as plaintiffs, arguing that Anthropic AI’s chatbot Claude has been ripping off copyrighted lyrics and passing them off as original.
A number of book authors have sued Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms and ChatGPT maker OpenAI for allegedly infringing the copyrights on their books. They argue that Meta’s LLaMa AI model and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have created “derivative works” of their books.
Like with the RIAA-led lawsuits against Suno and Udio, much will hinge in these lawsuits over whether the courts accept the notion that using copyrighted materials to train AI constitutes “fair use,” or is a violation of copyright law.
It’s likely that more music industry lawsuits against AI developers are on their way.
In May, Sony Music Group (SMG) sent letters to 700 AI developers, as well as music streaming services, notifying them that the company is “opting out” having their music used to train AI models.
The letter also asserted that “we have reason to believe that you and/or your affiliates may already have made unauthorized uses… of SMG content in relation to the training, development or commercialization of AI systems.”Music Business Worldwide
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