The Society for Musical Performance Rights (GEMA) has filed a lawsuit against AI audio generator Suno in the Munich Regional Court. The Collector’s Society accuses the provider of improperly training its generators with copyrighted musical works.
Advertisement
With the lawsuit, GEMA wants to ensure that companies like Listen pay royalties to authors for their use of the music. According to the Collecting Society, Munster includes songs such as 80s synthpop band Alphaville’s “Forever Young”, Christina Bach’s “Atemlos”, Boney M’s song “Daddy Cool” written by pop producer Frank Farian, and the work of Modern Talking. Duo Dieter Bohlen and Thomas Anders were particularly impressed. GEMA is confident that these and other titles will be replicated in a recognizable way in terms of melody, harmony and rhythm.
“AI providers like Suno Inc. use our members’ actions without their consent and benefit financially from it,” says Tobias Holzmüller, managing director of the Collecting Society. “At the same time, the output generated in this way competes with what people create and deprives them of their economic base.” Listen, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, currently charges its users $10 per month for the Pro version. Users receive credits that they can use to generate audio through prompt input.
GEMA seeks to create legal clarity
With the current lawsuit, GEMA is trying to further increase pressure on providers of generative AI services. Due to the availability of the app everywhere in Germany, the jurisdiction can be freely chosen; GEMA itself is based in Munich and filed a lawsuit against OpenAI just last year. However, the allegation here was not that the ChatGPT developer was using the music illegally, but rather that the copyrights of the songs were being infringed because no license was obtained for them. The collecting society, which has 95,000 members, wants to use the processes to force licensing by AI companies.
However, GEMA is not entirely sure that the legal approach will be successful: “If we do not want to work without human-made music in the future, we urgently need a legal framework that gives a fair share to authors and AI providers. Value creation,” says Ralf Weigand, Chairman of the Supervisory Board. The background to this uncertainty is the question of an exception regulation for the training of AI using text and data mining, which was introduced in 2019 under European law and German copyright. The law applies to all types of copyright works, even in the United States. The discussion about whether this can be done or not and to what extent is currently in full swing.
(MKI)
