Udio and Suno, two AI music startups, are currently embroiled in legal battles with major record labels, including Sony, Warner, and Universal Music. The lawsuits, filled by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in late June 2024, accuse these companies of copyright infringement for allegedly using copyrighted music to train their AI models without permission and consent of rightsholders. RIAA is leading these lawsuits, seeking damages of $150,000 per song for what they describe as a "massive copyright violation."
“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 says.
Read also: "6-12 months ahead of Suno, in AI time"—Udio Users Make an Average of 864K New Songs Every Day
In their defense, both Udio and Suno assert that their use of copyrighted music for training purposes falls under "fair use" provisions in copyright law. And that's not entirely unexpected. Suno argues that making copies of protected works as part of a technological process to create non-infringing products is permissible under fair use. They emphasise that their technology is designed to generate entirely new outputs and does not memorise existing content.
“We are not here to make more Fake Drakes. To further protect against misuse, we have developed proprietary, inaudible watermarking technology that can detect whether a song was created using Suno,” the team shared to Rolling Stone earlier this year.
Mikey Shulman, Suno's CEO, shared a blog post, called The Future of Music, that shares his vision on the matter. "Each and every time there's been innovation in music — from the earliest forms of recorded music, to sampling, to drum machines, to remixing, MP3s, and streaming music — the record labels have attempted to limit progress. They have spent decades attempting to control the terms of how we create and enjoy music, and this time is no different," he shares in the blog. "Suno helps people create music through a similar process to one humans have used forever: by learning styles, patterns, and forms (in essence, the 'grammar' or music), and then inventing new music around them. [...] model training looks a lot more like a kid learning to write new rock songs by listening religiously to rock music. Like that kid, Suno gets better the more our AI learns. "
He added: "The timing of this lawsuit was somewhat surprising. When this lawsuit landed, Suno was, in fact, having productive discussions with a number of the RIAA's major record label members to find ways of expanding the pie for music together."
Read also: Suno, Dope ChatGPT for Music, Is Out But Here’s Why It Might Be Problematic
Udio also contends that the premise of the lawsuit is flawed, arguing that music genres cannot be owned and that their use of existing recordings is aimed at identifying patterns to enable original music creation. They view the lawsuits as an attempt by the major labels to eliminate competition and protect their market share.
"The premise of their case is that musical styles—the characteristic sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music—are somehow proprietary. Entire genres of music, the idea goes, are effectively owned by the corporations that acquired rights to recordings made by the generations of musicians who pioneered, developed, and honed those styles, each building off of others’ innovations and creativity to push the progress of the arts incrementally forward," Udio's answer says.
It didn't take long for RIAA to respond. The Recording Industry Association of America published a statement that claims "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, as the Supreme Court just held in its landmark Warhol Foundation case. [...] 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 outcomes of these lawsuits could have profound implications for the AI and music industries. If the courts determine that the training of AI models on copyrighted music does not qualify as fair use, it could set a precedent that restricts how AI companies utilise data, potentially stifling innovation and increasing costs for AI development. Legal experts suggest that the resolution of this case may ultimately reach the Supreme Court, which would clarify the boundaries of fair use in the context of AI-generated content.
This legal confrontation is part of a broader trend where AI companies face scrutiny over their data acquisition practices. Similar to previous controversies involving AI text generators, the music industry is grappling with how generative AI technologies could disrupt traditional licensing models and the economic viability of human artists. Notably, a group of musicians, including high-profile artists, has voiced concerns that AI-generated music could undermine the rights and livelihoods of human creators.
