The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most critical AI music generators. A group of music labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group, filed lawsuits in a US federal court on Monday morning, alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale”.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. The lawsuit against Suno was filed in Massachusetts, while the lawsuit against Udio’s parent company, Uncharted Inc., was filed in Fresh York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim that it is ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and use it for your own profit without consent or compensation are destroying the promise of creating truly innovative AI for all of us,” – President of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Chairman, CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
The companies have not publicly disclosed what they trained their generators in. Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive who now runs the ethical AI nonprofit Fairly Trained, has written extensively about his experiments with sun AND Participation; Newton-Rex discovered that he could generate music that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted works.” In the complaints, the record labels claim they were able to independently induce Suno to produce recordings that “matched” copyrighted works by artists ranging from ABBA to Jason Derulo.
One example presented in the lawsuit describes how labels generated songs remarkably similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode” on Suno, using cues such as “1950s rock and roll, rhythm and blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer, guitarist” along with fragments of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly imitated the chorus of “Go, Johnny, go”; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno was trained in copyrighted works.
Udio cites similar examples in its lawsuit, noting that labels were able to generate more than a dozen products reminiscent of Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of the music and lyrics, and notes that Mariah Carey’s similar Udio-generated sounds have already been caught the public’s attention.
RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow says Suno and Udio are trying to hide the “full scope of their violations.” According to the complaint filed against Suno, AI did not deny that it used copyrighted material in its training data when asked in pre-litigation correspondence, but instead stated that the training data constituted “confidential business information.”
Many of the leading generative AI companies are under intense scrutiny for the way they train their tools. These companies often claim that they are protected by the “fair use” doctrine, which allows infringement under certain circumstances. Time will tell whether the judicial system agrees; major players such as OpenAI are already facing a number of copyright infringement lawsuits brought by artists, writers, programmers and other rights holders.