Suno, a music generation startup, acknowledged in a court filing on Thursday that it trained its AI model using copyrighted songs, asserting that this practice falls under the fair-use doctrine. This admission follows a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against Suno and another startup, Udio, on June 24. The RIAA alleges that both companies used copyrighted music without permission to train their models.
In previous communications, Suno’s investors hinted at the lack of permission from music labels, but the court filing marks the first direct admission. “It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case,” the filing stated.
Suno’s CEO and co-founder, Mikey Shulman, defended the company’s actions in a blog post published on the same day. He explained, “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet… Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels.” Shulman likened the AI model training to a “kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre,” arguing that “learning is not infringing.”
In response, the RIAA criticized Suno’s stance, stating, “It’s a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit. Their industrial scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use’. There’s nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals… Their vision of the ‘future of music’ is apparently one in which fans will no longer enjoy music by their favorite artists because those artists can no longer earn a living.”
The case is still in its early stages, but its outcome could set a significant precedent affecting more than just Suno and Udio. The legal arguments surrounding fair use in the context of AI model training could influence the broader industry and shape future policies.
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