Sony Music, UMG and Warner Records sue AI brands for copyright violations
nme.comAI) companies for copyright infringement.The news of the lawsuit was shared on Monday (June 24) by the Recording Industry Association of America, and accused companies Suno and Udio of committing copyright violations of “an almost unimaginable scale”.It is the latest of many lawsuits that have been filed in recent months, in a bid to challenge the rights of AI companies to use and reimagine their work.Udio is a firm based in New York, which has garnered popularity in recent months for allowing users to use AI in a musical setting.
Already it has received backing from high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz and gained attention as being the technology responsible for creating ‘BBL Drizzy’ – a parody diss track that emerged among the Kendrick Lamar/Drake feud.Suno is a company based in Massachusetts, which emerged in 2023 and claims that over 10million people have already used it to create AI-assisted music.
It works on a subscription basis, has a subscription with Microsoft and recently declared it raised $125million (£98.4m) from investors.The lawsuit made against them claims that each of their software steals music from their artists and uses it to “spit out” similar – and sometimes indistinguishable work.
It also seeks $150,000 (£118,200) in compensation per work.Neither firm has publicly commented on the lawsuit from the record labels.“The use here is far from transformative, as there is no functional purpose for… [the] AI model to ingest the Copyrighted Recordings other than to spit out new, competing music files,” read the complaints made by the record labels (via BBC).“[The] motive is brazenly commercial and threatens to displace the genuine human artistry that is at the heart of copyright protection,”.
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