Suno asks court to dismiss Jason Isbell right-of-publicity class action

MUSIC INDUSTRY

Suno has asked a federal judge in Boston to dismiss the proposed class action brought by Jason Isbell and three other musicians. The AI music company filed the motion on Tuesday, November 3, arguing that the right-of-publicity claims fail as a matter of law.

The lawsuit was filed on August 31 by Jason Isbell, David Lowery, Guy Forsyth and Eduardo Calle on behalf of musicians whose names were allegedly accepted by Suno as prompts. The complaint does not include a copyright claim, but accuses Suno of using names, descriptions and images that evoke artists and of extracting identifying attributes to train its models.

In its motion, Suno argues that artist names are often used as shorthand to describe musical genres or styles. The company says a prompt in the style of Isbell would be converted into a description such as “contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar”.

Suno also says it does not train its model to recognize artist names and that there is no “artist name” metadata field in the source material used to train the model. The company also raises arguments tied to the First Amendment and preemption under the federal Copyright Act.

Source: Music Business Worldwide