On Monday, a lawsuit was filed by the Recording Industry Association of America and a group of major players in the music industry against AI developers Udio and Suno. The legal action is based on the alleged "mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings," as stated by the RIAA.
The RIAA has filed lawsuits in the Southern District of New York and the District of Massachusetts, accusing Suno and Udio of using recordings without authorization to train their AI models. The recordings include songs by Mariah Carey, Jason Derulo, The Temptations, and The Jackson 5.
“As a preliminary matter, only Suno and Udio know the full scope of what they’ve illegally copied,” said an RIAA spokesperson. “They have both taken steps to hide the scope of their widescale infringement, which we expect to uncover in the litigations. But we know more than just that the snippets ‘sound like’ copyrighted recordings."
UMG Recordings, Capital Records, Rhino Entertainment, and Warner Music International are among the additional parties who are participating in the legal action against Suno and Udio. Suno and Udio are platforms that enable users to generate music by using descriptions or samples they upload. The RIAA lawsuit mirrors previous legal actions taken by book and news publishers against AI companies, accusing them of training their text models on copyrighted material.
The RIAA spokesperson stated that basic cues referring to an artist and their creations result in recordings that largely imitate and duplicate particular recordings by those artists or their voices, style, and sound.
“There is no way basic text prompts could produce such sounds if the models themselves had not copied and ingested those artists’ copyrighted work,” they said.
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