Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge
Getty
More than 25 copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against artificial intelligence companies from most sectors of the creative industries. The lawsuits, which include a wide range of groups including artists, authors and news publishers, allege that their copyrighted works have been stolen en masse to train AI systems. Of these groups, record companies have been the most aggressive so far in trying to get ahead on the technology.
Only companies in the music industry are banding together to sue, urgently trying to stop AI companies from profiting off what they claim are infringing their intellectual property rights. The trend continued on Monday, when a major record company sued two AI startups over tools that allow users to create music based on existing songs.
In lawsuits filed in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts, record companies led by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music allege that Uncharted Labs, the developer of Suno AI and Udio AI, illegally used vast amounts of copyrighted recordings in its AI systems. They are seeking an injunction to stop the companies from further infringing activity, including the destruction of models trained on their intellectual property, as well as approximately $350 million in damages.
Snow CEO Mikey Schulman said in a statement that the company's technology is “innovative” and “designed to generate entirely new output, rather than memorize and repeat existing content,” adding, “That's why we don't allow user prompts that reference specific artists. We would have gladly explained this to the record companies that sued — and we tried to — but instead of engaging in good faith discussions, they reverted to their old lawyer-driven ways.”
The lawsuit expands a broader legal battle being waged by creators that could halt the technology's further incursion into the creative industries. The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group for record companies, sees the unregulated creation of AI-generated content as an existential threat because it could compete directly with mostly human-made tracks and disrupt the market for music samples.
“The winners of the streaming era have worked with artists and rights holders to properly license music. The losers have done exactly what Suno and Udio are doing now,” a RIAA spokesperson said in a statement.
The lawsuit comes after major music publishers launched a legal battle last year to stop AI companies from using music for training purposes. They are waiting for a ruling on whether an injunction will be issued in one of the most high-profile cases on an industry-defining issue that may make its way to the Supreme Court.
Turning to the possibility that AI companies are violating the likeness rights of SAG-AFTRA members, national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said in a statement that “this massive infringement of recorded music, the vast majority of which is the creative work of SAG-AFTRA members, is illegal and unethical and must not go unchecked.” The group last month welcomed a proposed class action lawsuit against Berkeley-based AI startup LOVO, accusing the company of misappropriating the voices of actors, including A-list talent such as Scarlett Johansson, Ariana Grande, and Conan O'Brien. It is believed to be the first lawsuit against an AI company for using likenesses to train its AI systems, signaling a growing rift between creators and companies that allegedly indiscriminately collect vast amounts of data to power their technology.
Founded by a group of ex-Google DeepMind researchers, Snow and Udio are at the forefront of startups that allow users to create AI-generated tracks “for both personal and commercial purposes.” Enter a short prompt, such as “Billie Holiday-esque, jazzy blues with roses, atmospheric, sad, melancholic song,” and the tool will return a song in that style within seconds. Both are monthly subscription services, and their valuations have soared into the millions in recent funding rounds.
Like the music publishers' complaint against Anthropic, Monday's suit seeks an injunction, the only such lawsuit currently seeking immediate relief, which can be granted before judgment is entered if the plaintiff can demonstrate a high likelihood of suffering irreparable harm and a likelihood of winning the case.
The record companies allege that Suno and Uncharted Labs “massively copied copyrighted sound recordings and fed them into their AI system.” They note that the AI tool frequently generates works that are “highly similar” to the copyrighted recordings. According to the complaint, by using target prompts that include characteristics of popular songs (such as release years, genres, topics, and artist descriptions), the system returns music that reflects copyrighted works related to the descriptions.
The rush by record companies to resolve legal uncertainty about training AI systems with copyrighted works may stem from the commercialization of AI-generated content, a phenomenon more prevalent in the music industry than in other sectors: Spotify, for example, allows users to upload AI-generated music, but creators say the policy will flood the service with cheap content and devalue their work.
According to the lawsuit, Udio used the prompt “pop punk american alternative rock california 2004 rob cavallo” to churn out “Subliminal Hysteria,” which allegedly copies elements of Green Day's hit “American Idiot.” The lawsuit says the prompt “mariah carey, contemporary r&b, holiday, grammy award-winning american singer-songwriter, extraordinary vocal range” returned a clone of “all i want for christmas is you,” with a voice that's allegedly nearly identical to the artist who copied the first two verses of the original.
“If those who develop such services appropriate copyrighted voice recordings, the synthetic musical output of those services could saturate the market with machine-generated content that directly competes with, undermines, and ultimately overwhelms the authentic voice recordings on which those services are based,” the complaint states.
Labels have warned that AI tools could upend the market for music sampling, the process of licensing parts of a song to incorporate into new works. The controversy is not mentioned in the lawsuit, but Metro Boomin last month released a beat called “BBL Drake” in which he called on fans to record their own verses to attack Drake. Degrassi The alumni took on Kendrick Lamar on this beat, which samples an AI track and features AI-generated voices, melodies and Udio-generated instruments. It is believed to be one of the first high-profile examples of AI-driven sampling.
Udio co-founder David Ring says his company can “simplify a lot of the rights management issues” that come with sampling music.
Without Congressional intervention, the legality of using copyrighted works in training datasets will be decided by the courts. This issue will likely be resolved in part on the basis of fair use, which protects the use of copyrighted works to create derivative works as long as they are “transformative.” Fair use has been one of the main battlegrounds for the mainstream adoption of AI, with some companies limiting its use due to legal ambiguity.
The record companies' lawsuit echoes the position that the AI companies' actions fall within the scope of the doctrine, arguing that an existing market is being undermined. In the lawsuit, Sudo and Uncharted Labs threaten to “eliminate not only the existing market for licensing sound recordings, but also the market for licensing sound recordings to generative AI companies” by refusing to license the content they profit from. The complaint emphasizes that “potential licensees interested in licensing such recordings for their own purposes, rather than licensing copyrighted sound recordings, could potentially generate AI sound for essentially no cost.”
This argument may be aimed at undermining the fair use defense, which was effectively stifled by recent Supreme Court decisions. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith. In that case, the majority stated that the analysis of whether an allegedly infringing work has been sufficiently altered must be balanced against the “commercial nature of the use.” Music publishers are seeking to prove that the alleged copyright infringement has harmed their prospects of profiting from the material by preventing potential licensing agreements for the use of their music.
“The Supreme Court's 2023 Warhol decision held that it's not fair use when a defendant uses a plaintiff's work in the same commercial context,” said Ed Klaris, an intellectual property lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School. Noting that there has been an increase in cases in which rights holders “voluntarily license music to AI companies,” he said the argument is an “interesting new approach” to legal battles that could impact how courts approach analyzing legal doctrine.
In April, hundreds of musicians, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Mina, and Stevie Wonder, signed an open letter put forward by the Artists Rights Alliance calling on AI companies, developers, and digital music platforms to stop using AI to “violate and devalue the rights of human artists,” followed suit last month when Sony Music Group sent a letter to more than 700 AI companies urging them not to use its intellectual property to train AI systems.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by music publishers against Amazon's Antropic and transferred it to the Northern California District, which is overseeing similar lawsuits brought by artists and authors over AI companies training their technology on copyrighted material.
“Artists deserve their hard work and creativity to be respected in the marketplace and protected from services like Suno and Udio that undermine the very principles copyright was founded on,” said Jen Jacobsen, executive director of the Artists Rights Alliance (ARA). “These services are committing wholesale theft to train their models, flooding playlists with machine-generated knock-offs, violating creators' rights and devaluing the art itself.”
