The world’s leading record labels have sued two new artificial intelligence (AI) companies for alleged copyright infringement in a case that could mark a milestone in its development. Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Records claim that companies Suno and Udio have infringed copyright on an “almost unimaginable” scale. It is the umpteenth complaint for the use of AI in the field of culture and communication, after in December the newspaper The New York Times will sue OpenAI and Microsoft for fraudulently using millions of articles to train chatbots that now compete with their content. A complaint that eight other American newspapers joined in April.
The reasons for the lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of the United States (RIAA), which includes the major record labels, are the same as those put forward at the time by the New York newspaper: that the software of the companies Suno and Udio has trained their AI models with original songs and violated copyrights of their catalogues, for which they are seeking damages of $150,000 per work. Suno AI and Udio are free platforms specialized in music generation and text-to-music conversion, which are still available in beta. Both offer a free version, with limitations, as well as different payment plans.
The lawsuit targets each of these companies for allegedly infringing and exploiting without permission the copyrights of artists signed under labels such as Universal Music Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Records. The one imposed against Suno, developer of Suno AI, has been filed in the United States District Court of Massachusetts, while the one corresponding to Udio AI, which is developed by Uncharted Labs, has been filed in the United States District Court for Southern District of New York.
The lawsuits, announced Monday by the RIAA, are part of a wave of lawsuits from authors, news organizations and other groups challenging the liberality with which AI companies use their work. Massachusetts-based Suno launched its first product last year and claims that more than ten million people have used its tool to make music. The company, which collaborates with Microsoft, charges a monthly fee for its service and recently announced that it had raised $125 million from investors.
According to the RIAA, which believes that Suno and Udio’s offer “frustrates the promise of genuinely innovative AI” by considering it “fair” to copy an artist’s work and exploit it for its own profit, these claims concern musicians from multiple genres, styles and eras, with an incalculable total value in royalties. The aforementioned record labels, and smaller ones such as Atlantic and Capitol Records, indicate that the content that Suno and Udio used to train their AI models comes from copyrighted recordings reproduced without permission.
Suno, the lawsuit explains, “could not have built a model capable of producing audio so similar to the copyrighted recordings without copying those recordings.” This is because its AI first “copies massive amounts of sound recordings,” then “cleans” the copied files to remove duplicate or low-quality data, and then processes the collected information to “tune” or modulate its response model. AI, “which may require additional copies of the collected sound recordings.”
For this reason, the plaintiffs consider that Suno “frequently generates results that closely resemble copyrighted recordings,” and cite specific examples such as songs Deep down in Louisiana to New Orlewith a very similar structure to Johnny B. Goodeby Chuck Berry, or One, Two, Three O’Clockallegedly trained on Rock Around The Clockby Bill Haley & His Comets.
The association believes that “this violation cannot be solved simply by loosening the adjustment of the model or implementing technical barriers that make it less likely that the results coincide with excerpts from copyright-protected recordings.” In the lawsuit against Udio, the record companies point out that the training of their AI models is the same as Suno, with massive compilation that includes direct copying or downloading of songs from digital sources. After “cleaning” them, it processes them and establishes a series of values for the parameters that make up its model. Although the company has indicated that its model is trained with the “best quality music that exists” and that this is obtained from the Internet, where it is “publicly available,” the plaintiffs insist that this “does not mean the same as domain public”.
“The fact that plaintiffs’ catalogs of copyrighted recordings are publicly available does not mean that no one can copy and commercially exploit them,” the lawsuit stresses. One of Udio’s creations cited in the complaint is Sunshine Melodygenerated by the platform after entering the lyrics of the song My Girl by The Temptations in the text box. The same happens with Subliminal Hysteriaa creation very similar to American Idiot of Green Day, among other examples.
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