A lawsuit against Suno, Udio and OpenAI: The Recording Industry Association of America vs. the New York Times

The Recording Industry Association of America brought the lawsuits, along with a group of labels. The RIAA is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per work, along with other fees.

Suno is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and repeat previous content,” according to a statement from the company’s CEO. Shulman says Suno doesn’t allow user prompts based on specific artists.

Ken Doroshow is the chief legal officer of RIAA. According to the complaint against Suno, the AI company did not deny that it used copyrighted materials in its training data when asked in prelitigation correspondence, but instead said that the training data is “confidential business information.”

Suno executives and investors have acknowledged that the company may be sued in a Rolling Stone profile. Antonio Rodriguez told the magazine, “If we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it.” I think they needed to make a product that didn’t have constraints.

Companies that work with Artificial Intelligence do not release what data is used to train their models. The New York Times is one of the news publishers who are being sued by OpenAI. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Sora, the company’s AI video generator, was trained on YouTube content.

“Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists,” said Suno CEO Mikey Schulman in a statement. “We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook.”

The Udio lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that the labels were able to generate a dozen outputs resembling Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of music and lyrics, and notes that Mariah Carey soundalikes generated by Udio have already caught the attention of the public.