AI music firm Suno fired back Friday (Oct. 3) at new allegations from record labels that the company illegally scraped songs from YouTube to train its models, arguing the music giants are warping the meaning of federal internet laws that they themselves helped write.
The response came in a lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment that claims Suno violated copyrights en masse by ingesting vast troves of unlicensed works — one of many such cases amid the AI boom.
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Last month, the labels moved to add new allegations to that case: that Suno had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by “stream-ripping” songs from YouTube. The DMCA makes it illegal, separate from copyright law, to “circumvent” certain digital restrictions on online content.
But in a response Friday, Suno says the DMCA prohibits only getting around limits on access to protected materials, not those on copying stuff that’s already freely available, with its lawyers writing, “Anyone can access YouTube content.” And Suno says the labels clearly understand that distinction, since they were heavily involved in the passage of the 1998 statute.
“They are seeking to repudiate a legislative compromise that they themselves embraced to get the DMCA passed in the 1990s — acting now, nearly thirty years later, as if they won a lobbying battle that in fact they lost,” Suno’s lawyers write. “The court should decline the invitation to do what Congress chose not to.”
Suno’s new filing also blasts the addition of the stream-ripping claims to the lawsuit as a “gambit” by the labels, aimed at allowing them to continue their case despite a “burgeoning consensus” among other judges that AI training on unlicensed works is “perfectly lawful.”
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In technical terms, Friday’s filing asks the judge overseeing the case to refuse to allow the labels to amend their previous lawsuit to add the new claims to the case. The labels will have a chance to respond with their own filing. A rep for the labels did not immediately return a request for comment.
Universal, Warner and Sony sued Suno last year, claiming the company had infringed copyrighted music on an “unimaginable scale” and was “trampling the rights of copyright owners.” They also filed a near-identical case against Udio, another major music AI firm.
AI companies like Suno and Udio “train” their models by feeding them millions of existing works, teaching the machine to spit out new ones. Amid the AI boom, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in federal court over that process, arguing that tech companies are violating copyrights on a massive scale.
Suno and other AI firms say that training is clearly lawful under copyright’s fair use doctrine, which allows for the reuse of existing materials to create new works. In a response to the lawsuit last year, Suno accused the music industry of abusing its control over intellectual property to crush upstart competition.
Last week, the labels asked a judge to let them add the new DMCA allegations of stream-ripping to both cases. The move came after a judge in another major AI case ruled that, while training itself is covered by fair use, tech firms must legally acquire the works they ingest — and could owe hefty damages if they do not.
“Suno’s circumvention of YouTube’s technological measures has facilitated Suno’s ongoing and mass-scale infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrights,” the labels wrote in their proposed new complaint, seeking $2,500 for each violation.
But in its response on Friday, Suno says the DMCA’s provisions simply don’t cover materials that are freely available on the web. The motion came with a lengthy history of the legislative process that led to that statute, including unsuccessful efforts by “legacy media industries” to get stricter protections added to the bill.
“The reason why Congress chose not to prohibit the act of circumventing copy controls, even as it did prohibit the act of circumventing access controls, was specifically to preserve the public’s right to engage in fair uses of content that is lawfully accessible,” Suno’s lawyers write.
