RIAA SUES SUNO, UDIO FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

On behalf of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, among others, the Recording Industry Association of America has filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against music companies Suno and Udio over their unlicensed use of copyrighted sound recordings to train their generative AI models.

The suit alleges that "since the day" Suno and Udio launched, they have "flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music-generation service. Neither these services nor any other generative AI company can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.”

The RIAA is seeking declarations that Suno and Udio committed copyright infringement, injunctions barring them from doing so in the future and the recovery of damages. "Suno and Udio allow users to generate digital music files that mimic genuine human-created sound recordings in response to basic prompts," the RIAA said in a statement. "To build their products, they have engaged in mass infringement of real people’s art."

“These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale," RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said. "Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”

“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” added RIAA Chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. 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.”

The first state law establishing protections from AI fakes was OK’d in Tennessee in March when Gov. Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act at the Nashville honky-tonk Robert’s Western World, surrounded by Luke Bryan, Glazier, the Recording Academy’s Todd Dupler and assorted politicians. The ELVIS Act officially goes into effect on 7/1.