AI music startup Suno admits to using copyrighted music, but says it's 'fair use'

In response to a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by RIAA, AI music startup Suno claims its practices are fair use. But what constitutes fair use is up for debate.

AI music startup Suno has admitted that its AI model is trained on copyrighted music, but insists it's legally protected by the fair use doctrine.

On Thursday, Suno fleshed out this argument in a legal filing responding to a lawsuit from the Recording Industry Association of America on June 24. RIAA, which represents major record labels Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, is suing Suno and AI music company Udio for copyright infringement based on claims that they used music owned by the record labels to train their AI models.

In the generative AI era, numerous murky copyright battles have cropped up with no clear resolution. Media organizations like the New York Times Company have sued OpenAI and Microsoft alleging copyright theft. But AI companies claim their practice of using mass corpora of data scraped from the internet is fair use.

Suno had been vague about how it trained its AI music generator, despite damning note-for-note comparisons of RIAA copyrighted songs and Suno-generated songs included in the lawsuit. But now, Suno is claiming that this is perfectly legal according to fair use guidelines. "We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet," said Suno CEO Mikey Schulman in a blog post accompanying the legal filing. "Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials, and some of it is owned by major record labels."

In response, RIAA posted a statement on X, saying "[Suno's] 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."

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According to the U.S. Copyright Office, fair use "promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances." Such circumstances include "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research."

In the blog post, Schulman goes on to say Suno's neural networks learn "like a kid learning to write new rock songs by listening religiously to rock music," and therefore, "learning is not infringing." However equating synthetic intelligence to human intelligence is very much unresolved in the eyes of the law. Currently the Copyright Office says AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, which pretty clearly distinguishes artificial intelligence from human intelligence when it comes to the final product. But the "learning process," i.e. training data is entirely new territory.

Suno's legal filing alleges the RIAA lawsuit is essentially a David and Goliath situation where major record labels are trying to stifle competition. "Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the filing said.

Mashable has reached out to Schulman for additional comments and will update if we hear back.