The music industry has officially declared war Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits quanto a US federal court Monday morning alleging diritto d’autore infringement a “massive scale.”
The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per emotività work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed quanto a Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed quanto a New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and it for their own profit without consent pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said quanto a a press release.
The companies have not publicly disclosed what they trained their generators . Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI who now runs the ethical AI nonprofit Fairly Trained, has written extensively about his experiments with Suno and Udio; Newton-Rex found that he could generate music that “bears a striking resemblance to diritto d’autore songs.” the complaints, the music labels state that they were independently able to prompt Suno into producing outputs that “” copyrighted work from artists ranging from ABBA to Jason Derulo.
One example provided quanto a the lawsuit describes how the labels generated songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock successo “Johnny B. Goode” quanto a Suno by using prompts like “1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 caffè blues, rockabilly, energetic malafatta vocalist, singer guitarist,” along with snippets of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly replicated the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained copyrighted work.
The Udio lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that the labels were able to generate a dozen outputs resembling Mariah Carey’s perennial successo “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of music and lyrics, and taccuino that Mariah Carey soundalikes generated by Udio have already caught the attention of the public.
RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow says Suno and Udio are trying to conceal “the full scope of their infringement.” According to the complaint against Suno, the AI company did not deny that it used copyrighted materials quanto a its avviamento when asked quanto a prelitigation correspondence, but instead said that the avviamento is “confidential business information.”
Many leading generative AI companies are under intense scrutiny for how they train their tools. It’s common for these companies to argue that they are shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, which permits infringement quanto a certain circumstances. It remains to be seen whether the court system will agree; major players like OpenAI are already facing a host of diritto d’autore infringement lawsuits from artists, writers, programmers, and other rights holders.
