Proactive Investors - Universal Music Group (EURONEXT:AS:UMG), Sony Music and Warner Records have sued artificial intelligence-power music generation startups for infringing copyright of various recording artists.
The Recording Industry Association of America said overnight that two lawsuits had been filed against AI companies Suno and Udio for copying and exploiting recorded music without permission.
Compensation of $150,000 per infringement has been demanded.
Both lawsuits contain a common set of core allegations regarding the training, development, and operation of Suno and Udio.
In the Suno lawsuit filings, the RIAA's lawyers said testing of the AI product showed that prompts could "pinpoint a particular sound recording by referencing specific subject matter, genre, artist, instruments, vocal style" and Suno was able to "repeatedly generated outputs that closely matched the targeted copyrighted sound recording, which means that Suno copied those copyrighted sound recordings to include in its training data".
It was also noted that on social media, members of the public have observed that even less targeted prompts can generate songs on Suno that "resemble specific recording artists and specific copyrighted recordings [and] such outputs are clear evidence that Suno trained its model on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings".
RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said: “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge
“But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
The RIAA's legal chief Ken Doroshow said the lawsuits were "straightforward cases" of copyright infringement but "on a massive scale".
"Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing."