Labels Claim Suno Pirated Songs From YouTube in Bulked-Up AI Copyright Lawsuit

The major record labels are hitting AI music giant Suno with a new legal claim for allegedly scraping their songs from YouTube, taking a cue from Anthropic’s recent $1.5 billion copyright settlement while citing an exclusive Billboard report on mass piracy in AI training.

Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have been working together for over a year to pursue copyright infringement litigation against both Suno and Udio, the other major player in the fast-growing world of AI music, for allegedly feeding unlicensed songs into their models to train the machines.  

The labels are now moving to add a piracy claim to the lawsuit against Suno, writing in Friday (Sept. 19) court filings that they’ve recently confirmed the AI company illegally downloaded its training music from YouTube via a piracy method known as “stream-ripping.” The proposed amended complaint cites an exclusive Billboard report from this month that revealed the existence of private datasets demonstrating how both Suno and Udio scraped music from the internet on a massive scale.  

According to the complaint, stream-ripping violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing YouTube encryption measures specifically designed to hinder downloads. The labels’ new proposed claims seek the maximum damages for this alleged violation: $2,500 for each act of piracy.

“Suno’s circumvention of YouTube’s technological measures has facilitated Suno’s ongoing and mass-scale infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights through its unauthorized use of the Universal works, the Sony works and the Warner works in its training data,” the amended complaint reads.

On behalf of the labels, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said in a statement on Friday that Suno “has gone to great lengths to hide whether its AI models were trained on copyrighted music and how those works were obtained.”

“And yet, Suno has continued a game of deception because it knew its conduct was illegal,” added the RIAA.

Reps for Suno did not immediately return a request for comment on the proposed amended complaint on Friday. The labels have not yet made any moves toward filing this type of piracy claim against Udio.

The proposed amendment comes in the wake of AI company Anthropic agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to authors for building its central library out of pirated books. Like the record labels, many AI copyright litigants have recently been working to shore up their lawsuits with new piracy claims, including music publishers that are suing Anthropic over song lyrics in AI training.

The newfound focus on piracy can be traced to this past June, when the judge overseeing the book authors’ lawsuit against Anthropic, Judge William Alsup in California, ruled that the company would be held liable for storing pirated books. Anthropic settled rather than face trial over damages, though it remains to be seen whether Judge Alsup will approve the $1.5 billion deal.

However, Judge Alsup held in his June ruling that it’s not illegal for Anthropic to train its chatbot Claude on copyrighted books. The judge said training amounts to fair use: a foundational tenet of copyright law that allows protected works to be recycled for “transformative” purposes, like news reporting or parody.

Whether or not AI training constitutes fair use is a hotly contested question that’s currently being litigated in dozens of copyright lawsuits across the country, including in the record labels’ case. Suno and Udio insist that training their AI music machines on existing songs is transformative, and both companies are expected to present these arguments to judges after the discovery process concludes.