AI developers Suno and Udio have responded to a lawsuit filed by several music publishers in the United States for copyright infringement. In an initial statement, both companies admitted that they had trained their AI using copyrighted material. US Magazine Billboard Quotes The companies said they used “all music files of reasonable quality available on the open Internet” for the training. Until now, the companies had not published any details about their training materials in view of possible copyright infringement.
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The defense strategy of both companies focuses on a particular case in US copyright law: the so-called Fair Use Index. This allows the use of protected material, for example for quotation, for research or for certain non-commercial purposes. When this is the case is often up to the discretion of the courts. There have been many decisions as to when it was legitimate to rely on “fair use” and when it was not.
After the music publishers filed suit in June, Suno and Udio hired the same law firm, Latham & Watkins, to develop a joint defense strategy. The firm had already represented other AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, against lawsuits from various authors and the New York Times. American magazine Billboard reports,
Impact on Europe
This much-anticipated process could also impact Suno and Udio’s online offerings in Europe, where AI regulation has been in force since the beginning of August. Because European copyright law does not recognize “fair use” like the United States, the use of digital content for training AI models in this country is declining §44b Copyright Act This is allowed as long as the author has created a machine-readable reservation. There is currently a dispute in the courts over what does and does not mean by a “machine-readable reservation”.
However, in the case of musical recordings, in addition to the copyright of songwriters and composers, there is also ancillary copyright. This, among other things, protects the musicians and technicians involved in the recording. Unlike copyright, ancillary copyright law does not recognize any exceptions for the use of recordings for AI training.
Experts expect that proceedings in the United States could take years. European publishers and AI developers will be watching this very closely. Due to the different legal situation, it is quite possible that the case law here will ultimately differ from that in the “land of unlimited possibilities”.
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