SUNO AI has finally been sued by all major music labels

Envato Authors AudioJungle
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Link to the Complaint:

https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Suno-complaint-file-stamped20.pdf

Key takeaways from the complaint:

"7. Defendant Suno, Inc. is the company behind Suno AI, or simply Suno, a generative
AI service that creates digital music files within seconds of receiving a user’s prompts. Building and operating a service like Suno’s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to “train” a software “model” to generate outputs. For Suno specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies into Suno’s AI model so it can generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings. Suno charges many of its users monthly fees to use its product and produce digital music files, which are designed to entertain, evoke emotion, and stoke passion just
like the genuine sound recordings Suno copied.

  1. Given that the foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound
    recordings without permission, Suno has been deliberately evasive about what exactly it has copied. This is unsurprising. After all, to answer that question honestly would be to admit willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale. Suno’s executives instead speak publicly in exceedingly general terms. For example, one of Suno’s co-founders posted online that Suno’s service trains on a “mix of proprietary and public data,”1 while another co-founder stated that Suno’s training practices are “fairly in line with what other people are doing.”

Piercing the veil of secrecy, an early investor admitted that “if [Suno] had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product
without the constraints.”

  1. Of course, it is obvious what Suno’s service is trained on. Suno copied Plaintiffs’
    copyrighted sound recordings en masse and ingested them into its AI model. Suno’s product can only work the way it does by copying vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across every genre, style, and era. The copyrights in many of those sound recordings are owned or exclusively controlled by Plaintiffs. In other words, if Suno had taken efforts to avoid copying Plaintiffs’ sound recordings and ingesting them into its AI model, Suno’s service would not be able to reproduce the convincing imitations of such a vast range of human musical expression at the quality that Suno touts. Suno’s service trains on the expressive features of these copyrighted sound recordings for the ultimate purpose of poaching the listeners, fans, and potential licensees of the sound recordings it copied."
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“The lawsuits were brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the powerful group representing major players in the music industry, and a group of labels. The RIAA is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work, along with other fees.”

Source:

Take notice that Major labels have set an asking price equal to $150,000 per track. The price makes sense to me. Hit songs generate millions in royalties over a lifetime. Even a sinlge stock music track can generate Tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes $150,000 to $250,000) in licensing royalties, TV broadcast performace royalties, streaming royalties, CID royalties, well…all forms of royaties that exist, over 10 to 25 year periods (if you know what you are doing and have everything set up to exploit all royalty revenue opportunities).

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Who would doubt that Suno was trained illegally? There are probably tracks from the audiojungle that were also fed for training. :rage: