Record labels sue Suno and Udio over AI music training

Background

Suno and Udio are music generation services: software that produces audio in response to a user's instructions. A service of this kind rests on a model trained on very large quantities of recorded music. Copyright treats a sound recording — the captured performance itself — as a protected work separate from the song underneath it, so anyone who reproduces recordings needs rights from the companies that own them.

The filings

On 24 June 2024 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the US record industry association, announced that two copyright infringement cases had been filed against the music generation services Suno and Udio ^[1]. The case against Suno, Inc. was filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the case against Uncharted Labs, Inc., the developer of Udio, was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ^[1]. The plaintiffs are music companies that hold the rights to the sound recordings at issue, including Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings and Warner Records ^[1]. Filing in two different federal districts puts the two services before two separate courts.

What the complaints alleged

The complaints alleged that building the services required copying decades' worth of the world's most popular sound recordings ^[1]. The claim therefore centres on the copying said to have gone into making the services, not on any particular track they produce. Ken Doroshow, the RIAA's chief legal officer, described the matters as straightforward copyright infringement cases involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale ^[1].

Under US copyright law, copying a protected work without permission is infringement unless a defence such as fair use applies; whether training a generative model on recordings is covered by such a defence is the question the two services would be expected to contest. The complaints, as announced, frame the copying as unlicensed and large in scale ^[1].

What the labels asked for

The cases seek declarations that the services infringed the plaintiffs' sound recordings, injunctions against future infringement, and damages ^[1]. In the Suno complaint the plaintiffs asked for statutory damages of up to US$150,000 per work infringed, or actual damages plus the defendant's profits ^[2]. Statutory damages are a fixed amount that the law sets per infringed work and that a court can award in place of, or in addition to, proven losses; the figure claimed is the maximum available for wilful infringement of a single work. Because a music catalogue contains a very large number of individual recordings, per-work figures are where the scale of such a case becomes visible.

Why it matters

Mitch Glazier, the RIAA's chairman and CEO, said that unlicensed services which claim it is fair to copy an artist's life's work and exploit it for profit set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI ^[1]. The argument made on the industry side is therefore not only about payment for past copying but about what conditions music generation services should operate under.

For anyone building or using music AI, the filings put a concrete legal question in front of federal courts: whether a service may train on commercially released recordings without licences from the rights holders. An injunction of the kind sought would bear directly on how such a service obtains the material it learns from, while a ruling the other way would leave the unlicensed route open. The cases were announced as they were filed, so they mark the start of the dispute rather than its resolution.