Music AI companies Suno and Udio have been sued again, but this time by an independent artist. Anthony Justice has filed a class action lawsuit in Massachusetts that seeks to represent all the American indie artists whose music was added, without permission, to training datasets curated by either of the two AI start-ups.
The major labels have already sued both Suno and Udio, of course. However, as Justice notes in his lawsuit, while that litigation “continues to draw attention”, independent artists - “whose rights have been trampled the most” - are “the ones left without a seat at the table, unrepresented, and without a meaningful remedy”.
The claim that indie artists have been “trampled the most” by the music AI companies is based on the fact that the majors only control a minority of the tracks available on platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
Given Suno and Udio likely scraped most of the music publicly available on the internet, the majority of the tracks would have been from indie artists. The fact a lot of those tracks will have nominal numbers of streams is irrelevant given popularity has no real impact when an AI is learning from existing content.
As a result, even if the majors negotiate a settlement deal with both Suno and Udio - and there have been reports of settlement talks and licensing negotiations - it’s likely that the majority of the music used to train both AI models would not be covered by any such deals.
“Suno has openly and unapologetically admitted to scraping and duplicating ‘tens of millions’ of ‘publicly available’ songs”, Justice’s lawsuit states, and the majority of those tracks are “owned and controlled by independent artists”. Both Suno and Udio’s actions, it adds, “were not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the music community’s most vulnerable and valuable creators”.
We know that Suno and Udio - like most AI companies that have been sued by American copyright owners - claim that AI training constitutes fair use under US copyright law, meaning they didn’t need permission from any artists or labels when they copied all their music into their servers.
The record companies, like all copyright owners, strongly disagree, and that argument is at the centre of numerous lawsuits currently working their way through US courts, including the major label litigation involving Suno and Udio, and the lawsuit filed by a group of music publishers against Anthropic.
However, Justice’s lawsuit tries to defeat the fair use argument before it is even made by either AI company by heavily citing a recent US Copyright Office report. That being the report rush released last month before Donald Trump sacked Copyright Office boss Shira Perlmutter all about AI and the fair use defence.
In the report, Justice writes, “the Copyright Office emphasised that the fair use doctrine does not excuse unauthorised training on expressive works”, such as music, “particularly when those works are used to generate substitutional outputs that may replace the originals in the relevant marketplace”.
Therefore, Suno and Udio training their AI models “on the copyrighted songs of independent artists ... without authorisation, to then create competing music in the exact same marketplace, is unlikely fair use, and therefore, is prima facie copyright infringement”.
Elsewhere in the lawsuit, Justice introduces his music career and the label he runs, which is also involved in the legal battle.
He has, he explains, “invested years cultivating an all-American unique image, musical style and lyrical form that has garnered a large and loyal fanbase”. He is “even credited as creating a new genre of ‘trucker music’”, he adds. And although an entirely independent artist, he has enjoyed some success on the streaming services, with one track garnering over 8 million streams on just Spotify.
In terms of what other artists could benefit from the class action if successful, they are defined as “all independent recording artists” in the US - and any labels or other companies owned by those artists - who “own sound recordings” that have been “available on any internet-based streaming service at any time since January 1, 2021”.
Justice admits that the possible number of artists that qualify for the class is “so numerous” that it wouldn't be practical to formally add them to the litigation. He’s not even entirely sure how many class members there could be, but estimates it would be “thousands”, which actually seems like a conservative estimate.