Suno and Udio Are Getting Involved With Yout’s RIAA Lawsuit

The Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse. Photo Credit: NYU FC

Half a decade ago, well before Suno or Udio existed, Connecticut-based stream ripper Yout sued the RIAA over allegedly false DMCA notices. Now, as they grapple with stream-ripping claims from the major labels, the AI music generators are getting involved in Yout’s case.

Suno and Udio made as much clear in a recent joint motion seeking “leave to file brief as amici curiae to raise arguments relating to” section 1201 of the DMCA – and specifically the hot-button issue of fair use.

And earlier today, the appropriate appeals court – more on the marathon Yout v. RIAA showdown in a moment – granted the request. Now, the brief from Suno and Udio will presumably arrive sooner rather than later, and Yout as well as the RIAA will have the opportunity to “file supplemental briefs, not to exceed twenty double-spaced pages in length, in response” by November 10th if so inclined.

It’ll certainly be worth tracking the main brief and the possible follow-ups – not to mention the overarching case. While the latter has proven interesting from the outset (amid an RIAA-powered campaign against “stream-ripping” platforms enabling users to download videos’ audio, Yout flipped the script and sued the trade organization), it’s taken on a new significance due to the high-stakes Suno and Udio litigation.

Most are already aware of the copyright cases’ brass tacks: the defendants allegedly trained on protected music without authorization and purportedly reproduced similar audio in response to user prompts. Thus far, multiple gen AI developers have had a good bit of legal success arguing that at least the training process constitutes fair use.

But as demonstrated by Anthropic’s massive settlement with authors whose books it allegedly pirated, the means through which protected works were obtained en masse is proving a different story.

Add a bit of fresh alleged stream-ripping evidence into the equation and the result will apparently be amended complaints from the majors and others, all accusing Suno and Udio of circumventing YouTube anti-piracy tech to secure protected audio for training purposes.

Turning back the clock five years to Yout’s initial (and ultimately dismissed) action, the stream ripper took aim at several DMCA anti-circumvention notices forwarded to Google by the RIAA, which accused the now-plaintiff of bypassing YouTube’s “rolling cipher” en route to facilitating audio downloads.

The way Yout told (and tells) the story, however, its “software platform is not designed to descramble, decrypt, avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair the YouTube rolling cypher technology.”

“In fact,” Yout wrote in an amended complaint, “any digital mechanism in place designed as anti-circumvention technology prevents any user of Yout and its software platform from recording and saving works protected by such technology.”

Despite the top-level overlap in the arguments of Yout, Suno, and Udio – all three of which deny violating the aforesaid section 1201, of course – the AI-powered platforms are taking things a step further by emphasizing the distinction between access and copy controls.

In short, section 1201 allegedly allows for the bypassing of the latter but not the former, which might include, for instance, a password ensuring that only subscribers can access premium content.

“The resulting judicial opinion contains language that on its face supports the position Plaintiffs will assert in this case,” Suno wrote of the Yout action’s dismissal when disputing the majors’ amended suit. “But in reality it is of limited utility here, because the district court in Yout did not meaningfully engage with the question of whether a rolling cipher is an access control or a copy control.”

In a seemingly clear-cut indication of what its and Udio’s forthcoming brief will cover, Suno drove home the belief that “because the Yout court did not consider whether the rolling cipher was a copy control rather than an access control, that opinion should be given no weight in considering Plaintiffs’ purported section 1201(a)(1) claim in this case.”