AI music startup Suno admits to using copyrighted music but claims it’s “fair use”

AI music startup Suno has acknowledged that its AI models are trained on copyrighted music, but argues that they are legally protected by fair use doctrine.

Snow specified the allegations Thursday in a legal filing in response to a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America on June 24. The RIAA, which represents major record labels including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, is suing Snow and AI music company Udio for copyright infringement for using music owned by the record labels to train their AI models.

In the age of generative AI, many ambiguous copyright battles have arisen with no clear resolution. Media organizations such as The New York Times have sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright theft, but AI companies argue that their use of the vast amounts of data they collect from the internet is fair use.

Suno has been vague about how it trained its AI music generator, despite the note-for-note comparison between RIAA copyrighted songs and Suno-generated songs featured in the lawsuit. But now Suno claims that this is entirely legal under fair use guidelines. “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music found on the open internet,” Suno CEO Mikey Schulman wrote in a blog post attached to the legal filing. “Much of the open internet does in fact contain copyrighted material, some of which is owned by the major record companies.”

In response, the RIAA issued a statement to X, saying, “(Suno’s) industrial-scale infringement does not meet the requirements of ‘fair use.’ It’s not fair to steal an artist’s life’s work, extract its core value, and repackage it to directly compete with the original.”

The tweet may have been deleted

According to the U.S. Copyright Office, fair use “promotes freedom of expression by permitting unauthorized uses of copyrighted works under certain circumstances,” including “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.”

In the blog post, Schulman further noted that Suno’s neural network learns “like a kid who listens intently to rock music and learns how to write new rock songs,” so “learning is not copyright infringement.” But equating artificial intelligence with human intelligence in law is a very open question. Currently, the Copyright Office says that AI-generated art is not copyrightable, and there’s a pretty clear distinction between artificial intelligence and human intelligence when it comes to the final product. But the “learning process,” or training data, is an entirely new frontier.

Snow’s complaint argues that the RIAA’s lawsuit is essentially a David and Goliath situation in which the major record companies are trying to stifle competition. “Sno sees musicians, teachers and everyday people using new tools to create original music, but the record companies see this as a threat to their market share,” the complaint states.

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