AI music startup Suno claims training model on copyrighted music is 'fair use'

Following the recent lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against music generation startups Udio and Suno, Suno admitted in a court filing on Thursday that it did, in fact, train its AI model using copyrighted songs. But it claimed that doing so was legal under the fair-use doctrine.

The RIAA filed the lawsuit against Udio and Suno on June 24, alleging that the companies trained their models using copyrighted music. While Suno’s investors have previously hinted that the startup didn’t have permission from the music labels to use the copyrighted material, it hasn’t been so directly stated as it was in today’s filing. 

“It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case,” the filing states.

Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman continued on in a blog post published the same day as the legal filing, saying “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet… Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels.”

Shulman also argued that training its AI model from data on the “open internet” is no different than a “kid writing their own rock songs after listening to the genre.” 

“Learning is not infringing. It never has been, and it is not now,” Shulman added. 

The RIAA clapped back with this response: “It’s a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit. Their industrial scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use’. There’s nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals…Their vision of the ‘future of music’ is apparently one in which fans will no longer enjoy music by their favorite artists because those artists can no longer earn a living.”

The question of fair use was never simple, but with AI model training even established doctrine may not be applicable. The outcome of this case, still in its early stages, will likely establish an influential precedent that could define the future of more than just the two startups named in it.