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 has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”
The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is 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 to 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 pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
The best part about this is that UMG WMG and SMG all simultaneously went “you can’t take an artist’s life work and exploit it, that’s unfair, it’s OUR job to take an artist’s life’s work and exploit it”
I can’t tell which one is a shittier actor here…
Eitherway, this is not good for end consumer lol
We always get fucked
I hate to say it, but I kinda hope the music copyright cartel wins this one, only for the precedent it would set about things like proprietary use of MS Copilot output being an infringement of GPL-licensed code.
I don’t know which one is better tbh
the devil you know or the one you don’t!
Having all AI-generated code be either “viral” copyleft or illegal to use at all would certainly be better than allowing massive laundering of GPL-licensed code for exploitation in proprietary software.
Of course, because music belongs to the Record Labels. How dare it be made without their consent (and a cut being paid).
Music copyright is such a shitshow. It doesn’t surprise that they would try this.
Edit: I just heard the generated songs that are part of the lawsuit. They’re pretty fucked if this is true,
https://suno.com/song/16df3d1e-f817-4904-b9a8-eb6b18b6583d
https://suno.com/song/a9575656-5922-44fe-a925-b7582af7f8e4
https://suno.com/song/3b1f21b8-c56f-43fd-a858-6d70f0314b67
https://suno.com/song/a5d096df-98f7-4ba8-993b-b1696134e4c3
https://suno.com/song/b13bc2e2-5468-4b5c-b17f-44d23bdf9340
From this article
Edit: there’s even more examples in this article
Jesus Christ. Have people never heard of covers? Every song here is in some way or another akin to a published cover of another song. Pretty bad ones at that. Obviously if it were matching the songs one for one, then it would be considered copywrite enforceable but realistically these would be more along the lines of copywrite abuse. The music labels would absolutely love for this precedent to be set so that anything even that remotely resembles anything ever made will allow them to own new independent artists within established genres.
Here is a list of cases that set precedent. The thing that connects them all and makes them relevant is that the defendant was either successful, made a lot of money, was very popular or it was the label attacking a artist for sounding like themself after leaving the band. See John Fogerty v. John Fogerty
Here’s one. Did they overfit their model and think they could block the bad prompts?
