Music AI startups Suno and Udio slam record label lawsuits in court filings

Aug 1 (Reuters) - Artificial-intelligence startups Suno and Udio responded in federal court on Thursday to copyright lawsuits brought by music labels Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), Warner Music Group (WMG.O) and Sony Music (6758.T) over their music-generating AI systems.

Suno and Udio said the use of copyrighted sound recordings to train their systems qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law, and they called the lawsuits attempts to stifle independent competition.

"Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," Suno said.

"There's nothing fair about stealing an artist's life's work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals," a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America said in a statement on Thursday in response to the court filings in Boston and New York.

Suno said in a statement that the lawsuit against it is "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law." Spokespeople for Udio did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its filing.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Suno and New York-based Udio have raised millions in funding this year for their AI systems, which create music in response to user text prompts.

The labels sued the startups in June, alleging they copied hundreds of songs from some of the world's most popular musicians to teach their systems to create music that will "directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out" human artists.

The lawsuits were the first to target music AI following several cases brought by authors, news outlets and others over the alleged misuse of their work to train models powering chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

AI companies have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted material. Fair use promotes freedom of expression by allowing the unauthorized use of copyright-protected works under certain circumstances, with courts often focusing on whether the new use is transformative.

"What Udio has done — use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyze for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of various musical styles, all to enable people to make their own new creations — is a quintessential 'fair use,'" Udio said, opens new tab in its filing on Thursday.

The startups also called the labels' protests a "familiar refrain from incumbents in the music industry" - citing past concerns about vinyl records, synthesizers and drum machines replacing human musicians.

The cases are UMG Recordings Inc v. Suno Inc, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, No. 1:24-cv-11611 and UMG Recordings Inc v. Uncharted Labs Inc d/b/a Udio.com, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-04777.