The quick rise of AI tools for music creation has sparked numerous legal battles between these emerging tech companies and the established music industry. Three major lawsuits filed this year (or soon to be filed) could reshape the landscape for both AI development and music copyright law.
A special thanks to Kevin Casini for reviewing the legal details in today’s post.
Case 1: Record labels vs. Suno and Udio
In June 2024, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and other major record labels filed lawsuits against AI music generation companies Suno and Udio. The labels allege these companies engaged in "systematic and widespread infringement" of copyrighted sound recordings to train their AI models.
Key allegations
- Suno and Udio copied "decades worth of the world's most popular sound recordings" without permission to train their AI models
- The AI models can generate outputs that labels can prove closely resemble specific copyrighted recordings
- This infringes on labels' reproduction, distribution, and public display rights
- The companies profit from this infringement through paid subscriptions and market cap
The lawsuits cite specific examples of AI-generated songs that closely mimic hits like "My Girl" by The Temptations, "American Idiot" by Green Day, and "All I Want for Christmas is You" by Mariah Carey.
Suno's response: “It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process,” and “The outputs generated by Suno are new sounds, informed precisely by the ‘styles, arrangements and tones’ of previous ones. They are per se lawful.”
Udio's response: The company is "completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set" and has implemented filters to prevent reproducing copyrighted works.
Case 2: Music publishers vs. Anthropic
In October 2023, major music publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing, and Warner Chappell Music sued AI company Anthropic over its Claude chatbot. The publishers allege Claude infringes their copyrights by reproducing song lyrics without permission.
Key allegations
- Anthropic copied publishers' lyrics to train Claude
- Claude can reproduce complete or near-complete song lyrics on request
- This violates publishers' reproduction and distribution rights
- Anthropic profits from this infringement through API access fees and investments
The lawsuit cites examples of Claude reproducing lyrics to songs like "Roar" by Katy Perry, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, and "Friends in Low Places" by Garth Brooks.
Anthropic's response: Anthropic claimed that song lyrics are not in typical outputs, as “… Normal people would not use one of the world’s most powerful and cutting-edge generative AI tools to show them what they could more reliably and quickly access using ubiquitous web browsers.“