AI Music Startups Say Copyright Infringement Is Just Rock and Roll

Weeks after being hit with copyright infringement lawsuits, AI music startups Suno and Udio have accused the record labels that filed them of trying to stifle competition in the music industry. Both companies admitted to training their music-generating AI models on copyrighted material in separation legal documentsarguing that such action is consistent with the fair utilize doctrine.

The lawsuits against Suno and Udio were filed in June by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a group representing major record labels such as Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records. In both cases, Suno and Udio were accused of “copyright infringement involving the unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a mass scale.” The RIAA is seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work.

AI music generation tools Udio and Suno let users create songs by entering written descriptions. According to the RIAA, some of these songs feature vocals that sound identical to those of celebrated artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and ABBA. In May, Suno said that since the music generator was released in December 2023, it has been used 12 million times.

In their responses, both Suno and Udio say the lawsuits underscore the music industry’s opposition to competition. “Helping people create new forms of artistic expression is what copyright law is designed to encourage, not prohibit,” Udio wrote in its lawsuit. “According to long-standing doctrine, what Udio did—using existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyze for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of different styles of music, all for the purpose of enabling people to create their own new works—is the epitome of ‘fair use’ under copyright law.”

IN blog post In its own filing, Suno said major record labels had misconceptions about how their AI music tools worked, likening their model training to “a kid learning to write new rock songs by listening religiously to rock music,” as opposed to simply copying and repeating copyrighted songs. Suno also admitted to training its model on online music, noting that other AI vendors like OpenAI, Google, and Apple also source their training data from the open internet.

“Most of the open internet does contain copyrighted material, some of which is owned by major record labels,” Suno said in a blog post. “Science is not infringement. It never was, and it isn’t now.”

In a statement to Music Ally In response to Suno and Udio’s filings, the RIAA said the companies failed to obtain proper consent to utilize copyrighted works before bringing their tools to market, unlike competing services like YouTube. “There is nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its essential value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals,” the RIAA said. “Their vision for the ‘future of music’ is clearly one in which fans will no longer enjoy the music of their favorite artists because those artists will no longer be able to earn a living.”