In 2024, the big three major label music groups — Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music — filed a lawsuit against Suno for copyright infringement. An app that uses A.I. to generate music, Suno is accused in the lawsuit of illegally downloading music created by the majors’ artists from YouTube — a process known as “stream-ripping” — and using those songs to train its models without authorization.
Suno filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in early October, claiming that stream-ripping is not a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The majors filed their response in court yesterday, as Music Business Worldwide reports.
The motion dodges Suno’s assertion by claiming that the company bypassed YouTube’s anti stream-ripping encryption, created to prevent the unauthorized downloading of songs and videos. “The violation lies in the circumvention, not the reason for it,” the motion argues.
Suno has previously admitted to training its models on unlicensed music but claims to be covered by fair use. The labels respond in their new motion: “If Suno wanted fair use to shield it from liability entirely, it could have acquired its training data lawfully. Instead, it chose a cheaper and faster route: stream-ripping from YouTube.”
Suno is one of many programs accused of illegally ripping music in a recent report shared by the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP). It claims that apps like Suno, including Midjourney, ChatGPT, and many more, are ripping “tens of millions of works” by musicians and artists every day for what it calls “the largest IP theft in human history.”
