Suno fires back against the major labels ‘stream ripping’ allegations
Suno wants the judge to throw out the latest round of accusations from major labels, saying their fresh ‘stream ripping’ claims fall outside the scope of US copyright law.
Suno pushes back against fresh allegations
Last month, the major labels recently added new ‘stream ripping’ allegations to their lawsuit against Suno. The AI music generator is asking the judge to throw out the amendments altogether.
Their original lawsuit alleges that Suno unlawfully trained their AI models on copyrighted material, with the update including claims that Suno illegally copied songs from YouTube through ‘streaming ripping’ to train their models.
Suno wants the judge to reject the amendment outright, according to Billboard.
What’s Suno arguing?
Suno argues that US copyright law doesn’t actually prohibit copying material that’s freely available online. The company believes the majors’ amendment is little more than a reaction to the growing consensus that training AI models on copyrighted content can be lawful, under the defence of fair use.
Instead, Suno believes the amendment is a “gambit” designed to get around the fair use debate, describing it as a response to the “burgeoning consensus that using copyrighted content to train AI models is perfectly lawful”.
The legal details: What does US copyright law say?
Central to the case is the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prevents circumventing access protections on copyrighted material.
The labels argue that stream ripping circumvents the access protections put in place by YouTube, which aims to stop users from “viewing, reading or listening to works without proper authorisation”. Circumventing access protections is prohibited by the DMCA.
Meanwhile, Suno believes it didn’t circumvent any access barriers by accessing content that is freely available online. Instead, Suno suggests the major’s argument fits more in line with copy controls, “which protect the copyright holder’s exclusive rights, like reproduction or distribution, after lawful access has been obtained”. This isn’t prohibited by the DMCA.
The wider context
As CompleteMusicUpdate notes, Suno’s copying could still result in copyright infringement. However, the company would simply argue against this with its central fair use defence, which has been central to similar cases in the AI space.
For example, in the Anthropic case earlier this year, judges confirmed that fair use can apply to AI training. However, this fair use defence only applies when the content is obtained legally, meaning that Anthropic still had to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for illegally obtaining the content it used to train its model.
That ruling is key to the amendments here. The majors’ fresh stream ripping claims argue that Suno obtained copyrighted works illegally, which would mean its fair use defence would fail.
In short
- The majors added new ‘stream ripping’ claims to their lawsuit against Suno, accusing it of illegally copying YouTube tracks to train its model.
- Suno’s fair use defence would fail as a result, if the case is ruled in a similar way to Anthropic’s.
- Suno hit back, saying the law doesn’t prohibit using freely available material and that the amendment is just a tactic to block its fair use defence.
- The case now turns on how the court interprets the DMCA.
What happens next?
For now, it’s up to the judge to decide whether the amended complaint stands. Meanwhile, recent reports of licensing talks between Suno and the labels could render the lawsuit irrelevant anyway.
Regardless of either outcome, the case will be a defining moment in the future of AI and music.