AI music startup Suno hits back at record labels
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Music software startup Suno accused the world's largest record labels of using copyright lawsuits to fend off competition from music written by generative AI, according to a Thursday court filing.
Why it matters: Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music have alleged that Suno exploits copyrighted sounds and songs without permission to train its AI models to generate new songs.
- Their accusation is similar to one made by media companies, including The New York Times and local news brands, in their lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI.
What they're saying: "What the major record labels really don't want is competition," Suno said in a court document filed today.
Context: Content creators are trying to coexist with — and protect their businesses from — new generative AI businesses that rely on learning from previous bodies of work.
- Time, Vox Media and News Corp., for example, has a deal with OpenAI which allows the AI company to tap into archives for large language model training, Axios' Sara Fischer has reported.
- Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has AI tools that help influencers replicate their personas and communications styles online.
Zoom in: Suno admits that training its model from data on the open internet contains copyrighted materials, some of which is owned by major record labels.
- But doing so is no different from a "kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre," or a teacher or journalist reviewing materials to draw insights, the company's CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman writes in a blog post published in coordination with the filing.
- "[L]earning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now."
- Udio, a similar music software startup, is also a target of lawsuits from the music industry, and has made similar arguments in its defense.
The big picture: The recording industry has been at this kind of technological juncture before — when Napster and digital file formats massively disrupted its business models.
- With lessons from that era likely in mind, Shulman says Suno was already having "productive discussions" with major record labels to grow "the pie for music together."
- "Whether this lawsuit is the result of over-eager lawyers throwing their weight around, or a conscious strategy to gain leverage in our commercial discussions, we believe that this lawsuit is an unnecessary impediment to a larger and more valuable future for music."
The other side: The "defendants have finally admitted their massive unlicensed copying of artists' recordings. It's a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit," a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement.
Editor's note: This article has been updated with comment from an RIAA spokesperson.
