RIAA Files Suit Against AI Music Services
• The Recording Industry Association of America® (RIAA) announced the filing of two copyright infringement cases based on the mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission by two multi-million-dollar music generation services, Suno and Udio.
The case against Suno, Inc., developer of Suno AI, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the case against Uncharted Labs, Inc., developer of Udio AI, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs are music companies that hold rights to sound recordings infringed by Suno and Udio — among the labels listed in the two complaints are: UMG Recordings, Inc.; Capitol Records, LLC; Arista Records, LLC, Sony Music Entertainment; Atlantic Recording Corporation; Atlantic Records Group, LLC; Rhino Entertainment, LLC; The All Blacks U.S.A. Inc.; Warner Music International Services, Limited; Warner Records, Inc.; Warner Records, LLC and Warner Records/Sire Ventures, LLC. The claims cover recordings by artists of multiple genres, styles, and eras.
“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” said RIAA Chairman & CEO Mitch Glazier. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow added, “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
The cases seek: (1) declarations that the two services infringed plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings; (2) injunctions barring the services from infringing plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings in the future; and (3) damages for the infringements that have already occurred. The Suno complaint is posted here and the Udio complaint is posted here.
