The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”
The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
“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,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
That’s the argument I would be making, but it certainly isn’t Microsoft’s (Copilot), OpenAI’s (Codex), etc’s position: they think the output is sufficiently laundered from the GPL training data so as not to constitute a derivative work (which means none of the original licenses – “open source” or otherwise – would apply, and the recipient could do whatever they want).
Edit: actually, to be more clear, I would take either of two positions:
That the presence of GPL (or in general, copyleft) code in the training dataset requires all output to be GPL (or in general, copyleft).
That the presence of both GPL code and code under incompatible licenses in the training dataset means that the AI output cannot legally be used at all.
(Position #2 seems more likely, as the license for proprietary code would be violated, too. It’s just that I don’t care about that; I only care about protecting the copyleft parts.)