Three major music companies, including Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group, have filed lawsuits against AI music firms Suno and Udio for alleged copyright infringement. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed cases claiming that Suno and Udio used copyrighted music recordings without permission to train their AI models to create new music.
Suno and Udio have been sued in two courts in Massachusetts and New York for unlawful use of music recordings for the last four decades for creating artificial intelligence systems to produce music that imitates other records.
The complainant claims that such actions are not only against the provisions of copyright laws but also pose the potentiality of flooding the market with directly related products such as sales of AI-generated content in the place of original records.
RIAA representatives emphasized that the AI models developed by Suno and Udio were trained using copyrighted material without obtaining proper licenses.
The legal documents use cases of how AI-generated pieces by Suno and Udio sound nearly identical to original songs by Michael Jackson, ABBA, and The Beach Boys in what is a direct copying of copyrighted material.
The legal cases aim at obtaining injunctions to prohibit Suno and Udio from using any other copyrighted material in the future and also pay for the damages caused by the two companies.
According to RIAA officials, lawsuits protect fundamental copyright rights and uphold the legal standards needed for AI development. They contend that for creative AI technology that can improvise, create, and innovate it remains legal to do so while bearing in mind that individuals have the blanket protection under the law on intellectual property.
In response to inquiries, Suno’s CEO Mikey Shulman defended their technology as transformative and designed to create new musical outputs, not replicate existing content directly. Udio, on the other hand, has not publicly commented on the legal proceedings.
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