Sony and Universal Music Group sue Suno again over v6 model
Sony and Universal Music Group have filed another lawsuit against Suno. They claim that the v6 model infringes their copyrights because it was trained on the outputs of older Suno models, which were created from music illegally downloaded from YouTube and other sources.
Sony and Universal Music Group have filed another lawsuit against Suno, this time over its new v6 model. According to the lawsuit, the model infringes the copyrights of both music publishers because it was trained on the outputs of Suno's previous models - and those, according to the plaintiffs, were trained on music illegally downloaded from YouTube and other sources. Sony and Universal Music Group are among the publishers that do not have a licensing agreement with Suno.
In the lawsuit, which both companies provided to The Verge, they accuse Suno of so-called model laundering - the practice whereby training a new model on the outputs of a previous, allegedly infringing model does not, according to the plaintiffs, erase the infringement but instead launders it and transfers the value of the originally copied content into the next product.
This is another in a series of lawsuits that Sony and Universal Music Group are pursuing against Suno. Details can be found in the source article.
Why it matters
The lawsuit shows that music publishers consider even subsequent generations of AI models legally challengeable if they build on training data of unverified origin - so-called model laundering is thus becoming a new legal argument that plaintiffs could also use against other companies developing generative AI tools. For companies offering or planning to deploy AI tools for music creation, this means increased legal risk associated with the unclear origin of training data.
Two audiences, two different impacts
What this means
For individuals
Users of tools like Suno should expect that the legal status of generated music and the possibility of its commercial use remains uncertain due to ongoing disputes.
For a business
Companies that use or license music generation tools face the risk that products built on a chain of previous models could be targeted by the same model laundering litigation strategy, even without a direct link to specific downloaded content.
Risks and complianceCheck the original
Event sources
only one source so far · 1 publisher, 1 independent. We count feeds from the same owner only once.