Several record producers in the United States, such as Sony, Capitol and Atlantic, have filed a lawsuit against the technology company SUNO, Inc., specializing in artificial intelligence, for alleged copying of copyrighted songs.
Artificial intelligence and respect for human creativity
The basis of this lawsuit is that companies that develop artificial intelligence systems must respect the laws that protect human creativity. According to the plaintiffs, there is no justification for AI models to benefit from copyright exceptions.
The producers claim that the use of artificial intelligence without considering copyright could seriously harm the music industry, as it devalues and replaces the work of human artists.
SUNO, Inc. and automatic song generation
The model developed by SUNO, Inc. allows the creation of songs that sound as if they had been performed and produced by humans. According to the plaintiffs, this system could not generate such authentic results without having been previously trained with human recordings, which requires the authorization of the rights holders, in accordance with intellectual property regulations.
Despite these accusations, SUNO, Inc. has not explicitly denied the facts, claiming that the data used to train the artificial intelligence model is confidential.
AI model training process
According to demand, the SUNO, Inc. model follows a process structured in several phases:
Bulk download of pre-existing songs.
Corpus cleaning to remove unwanted fragments.
Establishment of specific parameters.
Final processing to generate new songs.
The plaintiffs argue that this process is based directly on copyrighted songs, and that the argument that there is no “overfitting” (excessive similarity to the original material) does not eliminate the fundamental fact: artificial intelligence is based on protected works.
Infringement evidence: reproduction test and “producer tags”
To bolster their claim, producers are providing evidence through a playback test. In this experiment, they asked SUNO’s system to generate songs, and the result featured melodies that were significantly similar to well-known works, such as Michael Bublé’s “Sway.”
Another important clue is the creation of “producer tags,” distinctive sound elements that identify the producer of a song. When the model was asked to generate one, the result was excessively similar to that of artists like Jason Derulo.
Is “Fair Use” applicable in cases of artificial intelligence?
SUNO, Inc. could try to invoke the doctrine of “Fair Use.” However, the plaintiffs argue that it is not applicable, since this is not an act of human creativity, but music generated artificially and imitatively by means of artificial intelligence.
Precautionary measures and jury trial
The competent court has considered that the use of artificial intelligence by SUNO, Inc., without respecting copyright, has caused irreparable damage to the plaintiffs. For this reason, injunctive relief and a jury trial have been agreed to resolve the merits of the conflict.
