The music industry has officially declared war on 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, filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”
The plaintiffs are seeking compensation of up to $150,000 per infringed work. The lawsuit against Suno was filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company, Uncharted Inc., was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“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 payment, frustrate the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” he said. the president and president of the Recording Industry Association of America. CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
The companies have not publicly disclosed what they trained their generators on. Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive who now runs the ethical AI nonprofit Fairly Trained, has written extensively about his experiments with Suno and Audio; Newton-Rex discovered that he could generate music that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted songs.” In the complaints, the record labels claim they were able to independently encourage Suno to produce productions that “matched” copyrighted works by artists ranging from ABBA to Jason Derulo.
An example provided in the lawsuit describes how the labels generated songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit, “Johnny B. Goode,” on Suno by using cues such as “1950s rock and roll, rhythm and blues, 12-bar blues, rockabilly, feisty man.” vocalist, singer guitarist”, along with fragments of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly replicated the refrain “Go, Johnny, go”; The plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted works.
Udio’s lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that the labels were able to generate a dozen productions that resemble Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of the music and lyrics, and notes that the Mariah Carey-like sounds generated by Udio have already caught the public’s attention.
RIAA legal director Ken Doroshow says Suno and Udio are trying to hide “the full extent of their infringement.” According to the complaint against Suno, the AI company did not deny using copyrighted materials in its training data when asked in pre-litigation correspondence, but instead said the training data is “confidential commercial information.” “.
Many leading generative AI companies are under intense scrutiny over how they train their tools. It is common for these companies to argue that they are protected by the “fair use” doctrine, which allows infringement under certain circumstances. It remains to be seen whether the judicial system will agree; Major players like OpenAI are already facing a number of copyright infringement lawsuits from artists, writers, programmers and other rights holders.