{"id":7441,"date":"2025-08-19T20:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T20:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ai-music-company-suno-responds-to-indie-artists-class-action-lawsuit\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T20:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T20:48:10","slug":"ai-music-company-suno-responds-to-indie-artists-class-action-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ai-music-company-suno-responds-to-indie-artists-class-action-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Music Company Suno Responds to Indie Artist\u2019s Class Action Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tA<\/span>rtificial intelligence music powerhouse Suno is trying to trim down a copyright lawsuit brought on behalf of independent artists, saying the case is \u201ccluttered\u201d with baseless legal theories not present in parallel litigation from the major labels.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn indie country singer named Tony Justice filed two federal class action complaints in June against Suno and fellow AI music upstart Udio, claiming thousands of unsigned artists are being left out of the landmark lawsuits brought against the two companies last year by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.<\/p>\n

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\n\tLike the major labels, Justice alleges that Suno and Udio are engaging in widespread copyright infringement by training their AI models on unlicensed sound recordings. Udio has not yet responded to the claims, but Suno says in a motion to dismiss filed Monday (Aug. 18) that Justice\u2019s \u201ctag-along\u201d claims will turn on whether AI training constitutes so-called fair use under copyright law.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe question of fair use in AI training is a complex and unanswered one currently being litigated in a bevy of copyright cases across the country. For now, however, Suno is seeking to cut away a second claim unique to Justice\u2019s lawsuit: allegations that the actual AI songs it spits out are \u201cnear exact replicas\u201d of existing songs and thus constitute infringement in their own right.<\/p>\n

\n\tSuno says this additional theory of liability, which is not present in the major labels\u2019 parallel lawsuit, \u201csimply doesn\u2019t track the law.\u201d According to the AI company, copyright law is clear that a sound recording can only infringe another sound recording if it includes a direct sample from the original.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat is categorically not how Suno\u2019s tool works,\u201d says the motion. \u201cIt exclusively generates new sounds, rather than stitching together samples. For that reason, plaintiffs could never have a good faith basis to allege that a given Suno output is actually an infringing derivative work of one of their songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tThis argument serves as a reminder that the copyright lawsuits being brought against Suno and Udio \u2014 both by indie artists and the major labels \u2014 allege only that these AI companies\u2019 models infringe sound recordings, not their underlying musical compositions.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a much wider legal framework for copyright infringement lawsuits to claim that a piece of music copies elements from an earlier composition. But most compositions are administered separately from artists and labels by music publishers, who have not yet initiated any litigation against Suno or Udio. A coalition of publishers is, however, pursuing copyright claims against AI company Anthropic over song lyrics introduced into the Claude chatbot.<\/p>\n

\n\tJustice\u2019s legal team did not immediately return a request for comment on Suno\u2019s motion to dismiss on Tuesday (Aug. 19).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence music powerhouse Suno is trying to trim down a copyright lawsuit brought on behalf of independent artists, saying the case is \u201ccluttered\u201d with baseless legal theories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[715,584,650,413,6329,303,593,1530,2112],"class_list":["post-7441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-action","tag-artists","tag-class","tag-company","tag-indie","tag-lawsuit","tag-music","tag-responds","tag-suno"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}