AI Music Startup Suno Claims Fair Use in Copyright Lawsuit
In a legal filing responding to a lawsuit from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), AI music startup Suno admitted that its AI model is trained on copyrighted music. However, the company insists that it is legally protected by the fair use doctrine. The RIAA, which represents major record labels Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, is suing Suno and AI music company Udio for copyright infringement based on claims that they used music owned by the record labels to train their AI models.
The use of copyrighted music in AI training has become a contentious issue in the generative AI era. Media organizations like the New York Times Company have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright theft. However, AI companies argue that their practice of using mass corpora of data scraped from the internet falls under fair use. Suno had been vague about how it trained its AI music generator, despite note-for-note comparisons of RIAA copyrighted songs and Suno-generated songs included in the lawsuit.
To clarify its position, Suno CEO Mikey Schulman stated in a blog post accompanying the legal filing that the company trains its models on medium- and high-quality music found on the open internet. Schulman acknowledged that much of this music is copyrighted and owned by major record labels. Suno claims that this practice is legal under fair use guidelines.
In response, the RIAA issued a statement asserting that Suno’s “industrial scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use.'” The organization argues that there is nothing fair about stealing an artist’s work and repackaging it to compete with the originals.
The fair use doctrine, according to the U.S. Copyright Office, permits the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances, including criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Suno argues that its neural networks learn by listening to existing music, comparing the process to a child learning to write new songs by religiously listening to rock music. However, equating synthetic intelligence to human intelligence is still an unresolved issue in the eyes of the law.
While the Copyright Office currently states that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, the issue of training data is uncharted territory. Suno’s legal filing portrays the lawsuit as a David and Goliath situation, with major record labels attempting to stifle competition. The filing argues that Suno’s tool enables musicians, teachers, and everyday people to create original music, but the labels perceive it as a threat to their market share.
The outcome of this lawsuit could have significant implications for the AI music industry as it seeks to navigate the complex landscape of copyright law.
