Sony, Warner and Universal Music all sued the AI start-ups in June, accusing them of copyright infringement.
Suno and Udio, two AI start-ups innovating in the AI-generated music space, have responded to copyright lawsuits brought against them by major record labels, calling them “fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law”.
The start-ups argue that training their AI models on copyrighted music belonging to the record labels to create services that allow anyone to create music constitutes “fair use” under copyright law.
“It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product,” Suno argued in a court document yesterday (1 August).
Background
Major record labels Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records filed a lawsuit against Massachusetts-based Suno and New York-based Udio in late June, accusing them of copyright infringement by using music belonging to the records to train their AI systems.
Earlier in the year, hundreds of musicians – including Billie Eilish and Katy Perry – signed an open letter calling on developers to stop using AI to “devalue the rights of human artists” and “sabotage creativity”.
“These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI ‘sounds’ and ‘images’ that substantially dilute the royalty pools that are paid out to artists,” the letter read, adding that the growth of AI-generated music would be “catastrophic” for many working musicians in the industry that are “just trying to make ends meet”.
“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 yesterday in response to Suno and Udio’s court filings.
Can music genres be owned?
Suno argued in its court responses that the lawsuit brought forward by the recording association on behalf of major record labels want to “shut” it down because the labels “don’t want competition”.
“They are a collection of the largest record labels in the world, which collectively dominates the music industry … 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.”
Uncharted Labs, which makes Udio AI, argued in its response that the premise of the lawsuit brought against it is “fundamentally wrong” because musical styles such as opera, jazz or rap are not proprietary.
“Entire genres of music, the idea goes, are effectively owned by the corporations that acquired rights to recordings made by the generations of musicians who pioneered, developed and honed those styles, each building off of others’ innovations and creativity to push the progress of the arts incrementally forward,” the company wrote.
“What Udio has done – use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyse 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’ under copyright law.”
In the background of the complaints and lawsuits, Suno and Udio have been raising millions in investment to develop their generative AI technologies.
In April, Udio raised $10m in seed funding from a16z, Instagram co-founder Mike Kreiger, and musicians will.i.am and Common. The following month, Suno raised $125m in a round backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
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