Copyright Allegations Levied Against Music Generators
Summary
On June 24, 2024, a group of music labels, including UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records filed copyright allegations against various AIgenerated music tools: Suno in the District of Massachusetts and Udio in the Southern District of New York. Unlike the allegations against Anthropic (which were transferred from the Middle District of Tennessee to the Northern District of California on June 24, 2024), which focused on song lyrics, these new cases are directed to full recordings of music.
Similar to the LLM cases, the plaintiffs allege that the training data set contains copyrighted works and the plaintiffs created “targeted prompts that include the characteristics of popular sound recordings” to produce the allegedly infringing outputs, such as “[C]anadian smooth male singer 2004 jazz pop [B]uble sway latin mambo minor key” to generate an output that is claimed to sound like Michael Bublé. The plaintiffs allege that these outputs directly infringe and did not allege any derivative theories. The complaint also references the recent copyright case Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508, 528 (2023), arguing that the outputs infringe as “substitutes” for the original work.
