Universal Music & Sony Music File 2nd Copyright Suit Against Suno

How many lawsuits is that now? Universal Music and Sony Music have fired off another complaint against Suno for allegedly training on an “enormous number of copyrighted sound recordings” without authorization.

With their original Suno copyright suit still in motion, the non-Warner majors submitted the supersized infringement action to a Massachusetts federal court today. And like with Sony Music’s amended Udio complaint – both Universal Music and Warner Music have settled with the platform – the stakes are high.

This time around, the litigating labels are accusing Suno of infringing on (and violating the DMCA by stream-ripping) 60,202 recordings – a massive figure that they maintain represents “only a small portion of” the actual total.

(As some will recall from our prior coverage, the plaintiffs came up short in their pushes to capitalize on discovery findings by adding a multitude of tracks to the existing suits; the courts emphasized that doing so would dramatically prolong the cases. But the same judges left the door open to spearheading separate complaints.)

Based on these often-discussed central claims, that the suit touches on a variety of familiar bases shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sony Music and Universal Music are adamant that Suno’s training – and not solely the allegedly free-for-all training associated with its retired models; more here in a moment – isn’t protected by fair use, for instance.

“The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but Suno offers imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression,” the legal text reads.

However, the action also explores a few new angles. Most notably, despite Suno’s rollout of v6 in partnership with Warner Music, BMG, and Believe, the plaintiffs say their own recordings factored into the training as well.

In brief, Suno’s prior versions were allegedly “trained on the same corpus of copied sound recordings” at hand and allegedly went on to be utilized in connection with v6 – thereby allegedly rendering the latter “a product of those tainted models.”

An in-depth description, covering the process through which “a new ‘student’ model is trained to reproduce the learned behavior of a predecessor ‘teacher’ model, including through training of the ‘student’ on both non-synthetic data and synthetic outputs of the ‘teacher,’” follows.

Legalese aside, it goes without saying that this is a particularly important contention.

With the aforementioned three companies now counting Suno as a partner – and with v6 having replaced all prior models – it doesn’t seem like a stretch to deem the underlying deals components of a significant pivot for the platform.

Significant pivot (and considerable rightsholder revenue potential) or not, it’s safe to describe Universal Music and Sony Music as being on an entirely different page.

“Suno has never claimed to have destroyed or ceased using the unauthorized copies of copyrighted works it unlawfully obtained in the first instance, and on information and belief it retains and continues to use them,” per Universal Music and Sony Music. “v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”

As a presumably lucrative licensing framework is currently available, does this mean the plaintiff majors will only be content if Suno implements a full-scale walled-garden overhaul or ceases operating altogether?

That question is best left for Universal Music and Sony Music themselves, but we may already have a general answer thanks to their second Suno suit. More urgently, what of the growing number of China-based AI music platforms that allegedly trained on protected music and that allegedly infringe IP in their outputs?

Time will tell, though thus far, the industry response has been muted – generally and especially when compared to the aggressive crackdown on allegedly infringing AI in the States, Canada, and Europe.