Major record companies including Sony, Universal and Warner sued two digital music production companies on Monday, accusing them of using copyrighted audio and songs to train the artificial intelligence that powers their businesses.
The two companies being sued, Udio and Suno, allow users to create songs almost instantly by sending text commands, in the same way that AI services like Midjourney can generate images based on text prompts.
The power of artificial intelligence is transforming many industries, reaping economic benefits for companies that can harness the technology, but the music industry plaintiffs argue in their lawsuits that the songs these AI companies have produced were only possible because their systems were trained on vast amounts of intellectual property owned by the plaintiffs.
“The basis of the company's business was the unauthorized use of copyrighted audio recordings,” says the lawsuit filed against Udio and Sno in federal court.
“To build and operate a service like Udio, one must first copy and ingest large amounts of data and then 'train' software 'models' to generate output,” one lawsuit states. “Specifically, in Udio's case, this process involved copying decades' worth of the world's most popular sound recordings.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare that the companies have infringed copyrights and to award damages.
“These are clear-cut cases of copyright infringement involving the unauthorized duplication of sound recordings on a large scale,” Ken Doroshow, chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, an industry group, said in a statement.
Doroshow added that “these lawsuits are necessary to enforce the most fundamental rules for the responsible, ethical and lawful development of generative AI systems.”
In a statement on its website, Udio denied that its software training methods were improper.
“Just as a student listens to music and studies sheet music, our model 'listens' to and learns from vast amounts of recorded music,” the company said. “The goal of training the model is to develop an understanding of musical ideas – the fundamental building blocks of musical expression that are not owned by anyone. Our system is explicitly designed to create music that reflects new musical ideas.”
Sno CEO Mikey Schulman defended the company in an emailed statement.
“Our technology is transformative; it's designed to generate entirely new output rather than memorizing and repeating existing content,” Shulman said, adding that users cannot reference specific artists when asking Snow's software to create something.
“Suno is built for new music, new uses and new musicians,” says Shulman. “We value originality.”
The new lawsuit is reminiscent of earlier lawsuits from the creative industries that accuse AI companies of training their profitable systems on material owned by others.
The New York Times has sued Microsoft and ChatGPT developer OpenAI, alleging that millions of its articles were used to train an AI platform, and photo syndicate Getty Images has made similar arguments in its lawsuit against Stability AI.
Actress and comedian Sarah Silverman and a group of novelists, including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham, have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging that the company used their work to train its systems.
