Universal and Sony sue Suno again over v6 models

MUSIC INDUSTRY

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have sued Suno for a second time. The joint complaint, filed on Friday, September 18, in Boston federal court, accuses the AI music company of copying 60,202 of the labels’ sound recordings without a license to build the models behind its music generation service.

According to Music Business Worldwide, US copyright law allows damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement: applied to the 60,202 recordings, the theoretical ceiling would exceed $9 billion. The labels also seek up to $2,500 for each alleged act of circumventing YouTube’s anti-downloading technology, as well as a court order stopping further use of the recordings and a jury trial.

The new central issue concerns v6, the model suite Suno launched on September 9. Suno says v6 was built in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and Chief Product Officer Jack Brody said the model was trained from scratch without Universal or Sony data.

The labels argue instead that v6 is based on outputs and preference data from earlier models trained on unauthorized recordings, including through knowledge distillation. The complaint also cites Suno’s deals with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe as evidence that a market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI.

Source: Music Business Worldwide