Following a recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno acknowledged in a court filing on Thursday that it did indeed train its AI models using copyrighted music, but the company argued that doing so was lawful under fair use doctrine.
The RIAA filed suit against Udio and Suno on June 24, alleging that the companies trained their models using copyrighted music. Suno investors have previously suggested that the startup didn't have permission from music labels to use copyrighted material, but they haven't stated that as directly as in today's lawsuit.
“It is publicly known that the tens of millions of recordings on which the Snow models were trained likely included recordings in which Plaintiffs in this case own rights,” the complaint states.
“We train our models on medium-high quality music found on the open internet, much of which contains copyrighted material, some of which is owned by the major record companies,” Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman said in a blog post published the same day the lawsuit was filed.
Schulman also argued that training an AI model from data on the “open internet” is no different from “a kid listening to the rock genre and writing his own rock song.”
“Learning is not invasive. It never has been, and it never is,” Schulman added.
The RIAA countered: “This is a major concession to a fact they spent months trying to hide and only admitted after being forced by litigation: Their industrial-scale infringement does not qualify as 'fair use.' It's not fair to steal an artist's life's work, extract its core value, and repackage it to directly compete with the original… Their vision of the 'future of music' seems to be one in which fans can no longer enjoy the music of their favorite artists because artists can no longer make a living.”
Fair use issues are never simple, but when it comes to training AI models, even well-established principles may not apply. The outcome of this case, which is still in its early stages, is likely to set an influential precedent that will shape the future of not only the two startups named in the suit, but others as well.