On 1 August 2024, Suno, a leading AI music generator, disclosed in court that its product was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality” accessible online. This admission surfaced during a lawsuit brought in the United States by major record labels, including Universal Music Group and Warner Music. The lawsuit alleges that Suno scraped vast amounts of copyrighted music without permission and reproduced parts of famous songs in their AI-generated outputs.
Suno’s court filing confirmed that its AI model ingested tens of millions of recordings, including those owned by the plaintiffs. The company defended its actions by arguing that the use of copyrighted material for AI training should be considered Fair Use, claiming that its AI was designed to create new, original songs. Suno criticized the music industry’s licensing practices, suggesting they aim to stifle AI development.
The record labels’ lawsuit presents evidence that Suno can generate music strikingly similar to famous songs in their catalogs, with specific examples like Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” being cited. Suno has argued that their use of copyrighted material for AI training falls under Fair Use, positioning the case as a critical test of whether mass data scraping for AI products can be considered a transformative, protected use of copyrighted content.
The outcome of this legal battle could have profound implications for the legality of using copyrighted works to train AI models, potentially shaping the future of AI-generated content across various media.
Read 404Media’s reporting here.
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