Major Labels Sue AI Music Services Suno and Udio for Copyright Infringement (2024)

Jun 24, 2024 7:59am PT

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• “AI companies, like all other enterprises, must abide by the laws that protect human creativity and ingenuity. There is nothing that exempts AI technology from copyright law or that excuses AI companies from playing by the rules. Th[ese] lawsuit[s] see[k] to enforce these basic principles.” (Complaints ¶ 2.)
• “[T]here is both promise and peril with AI. As more powerful and sophisticated AI tools emerge, the ability for AI to weave itself into the processes of music creation, production, and distribution grows. If developed with the permission and participation of copyright owners, generative AI tools will be able to assist humans in creating and producing new and innovative music. But if developed irresponsibly, without regard for fundamental copyright protections, those same tools threaten enduring and irreparable harm to recording artists, record labels, and the music industry, inevitably reducing the quality of new music available to consumers and diminishing our shared culture.” (Complaints ¶ 3.)
• “Building and operating [these services] requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to “train” a software “model” to generate outputs. For [these services], this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.” (Complaints ¶ 7.)
• “When those who develop such [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.” (Complaints ¶ 4.)
• “Given that the foundation of [these businesses] has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission, [they have] been deliberately evasive about what exactly [they have] copied. This is unsurprising. After all, to answer that question honestly would be to admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.” (Complaints ¶ 8.)
• “Of course, it is obvious what [these services are] trained on. [They] copied Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings en masse and ingested them into [their] AI model[s]. [These] product[s] can only work the way [they do] by copying vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across multiple genres, styles, and eras. (Complaints ¶ 9.)
• “[These services are] not exempt from the copyright laws that protect human authorship. Like any other market participant, [they] cannot reproduce copyrighted works for a commercial purpose without permission. Heedless of this basic principle, [their] unauthorized copying erodes the value and integrity of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings with rapid and devastating impact. [These] service[s] generat[e] music with such speed and scale that it risks overrunning the market with AI-generated music and generally devaluing and substituting for human-created work.” (Complaints ¶ 12.)
• “[The services] cannot avoid liability for [their] willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circ*mstances, but [the services] offe[r] imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression.” (Complaints ¶ 14.)
• “Since the day [they] launched, [the services have] flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service. Neither [these services] nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.” (Complaints ¶ 81.)