Following a recent lawsuit initiated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno acknowledged in a court filing on Thursday that it trained its AI model using copyrighted songs. However, Suno defended its actions, asserting that this was permissible under the fair-use doctrine.
The lawsuit, filed on June 24, alleges that both companies utilized copyrighted music to train their models. Although Suno’s investors had previously suggested that the startup lacked permission from music labels to use such material, this was the first explicit admission made in a legal context.
The filing clearly states, “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.”
Suno's CEO and co-founder, Mikey Shulman, elaborated on this in a blog post published concurrently with the legal filing. He explained, “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet… Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels.”
Shulman compared the process to a “kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre,” emphasizing that “learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now.”
The RIAA responded sharply, stating, “It’s a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit. 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… 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 issue of fair use has always been complex, and the advent of AI model training further complicates it. The outcome of this case, which is still in its early stages, is likely to set a significant precedent that could influence the future of many more entities beyond the two startups involved.
