Universal and Sony File New Lawsuit Against Suno Regarding Fully-Licensed v6 Model

Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony have filed a new lawsuit against AI music giant Suno. This latest action, which comes on top of the ongoing copyright infringement suit, focuses on Suno’s new v6 model that was trained on licensed data from Warner Music Group (WMG).

The suit:

• UMG and Sony have stated that despite being trained on licensed data, the new model is “fruit of the same poisoned tree.”

• That phrase refers to a legal term meaning that any ruling based on illegally obtained evidence must be dismissed.

• Relevantly, the plaintiffs claim that regardless of the specific data used for v6, Suno developed such a model based on its previous models that allegedly used illegally gathered data.

• This new suit brings in 60,202 of the labels’ sound recordings, accusing Suno of copying them without permission.

• The labels have also demanded a jury trial.

Background:

• Suno Chief Product Officer Jack Brody told New Industry Focus ahead of the v6 launch that the new model did not use any data from Sony or UMG.

• BMG and Believe have also signed licensing deals with Suno and are expected to contribute data to v6.

What they said:

• Music Business Worldwide gathered all quotes directly from the new lawsuit:

• “Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6.”

• “Three agreements with three major rightsholders in less than a year confirm that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI models and that Suno itself recognizes that using copyrighted sound recordings for this purpose requires permission.”