German songwriter collecting society GEMA has scored a significant victory in its legal battle with music AI company Suno in the Munich Regional Court. This dispute is a key test case when it comes to the copyright obligations of AI companies under European law. GEMA’s initial win - announced this morning - has, unsurprisingly, been widely welcomed by the music industry.
The German court considered three separate allegations that Suno infringed the rights in GEMA controlled songs and compositions, ultimately siding with the songwriter collecting society on all three claims.
The first infringement came from Suno making copies of GEMA controlled works when collating a training database in the US. The second when it stored a copy of its finished model on servers in Germany, on the basis the model includes elements of the training data because of so called ‘memorisation’. And the third infringement occurred when Suno outputted music almost identical to GEMA compositions.
As a result of today’s judgment, the AI company must now stop reproducing the six specific works that GEMA built its case around - including for the purposes of training its models - and also provide the collecting society with information about the scope of the use of the works that were infringed, account the revenues generated as a result, and pay damages.
Functionally, today’s judgement also means that Suno needs to stop using GEMA’s entire repertoire unless it secures a licence. While the court case only considered six works - a deliberate tactic on GEMA’s part to keep the burden of evidence manageable in the proceedings - the court’s reasoning applies to any GEMA controlled work that appears in Suno’s training data.
GEMA’s response to its win
In a statement welcoming the ruling, GEMA provides a concise summary of the court’s judgement. Basically, by “training its AI systems on world famous songs from GEMA’s repertoire in the USA” and then “storing and reproducing them in Europe”, Suno is “in breach” of both US and German copyright law.
As a result, GEMA’s statement adds, the court has confirmed that “the exploitation and reproduction of musical works from the GEMA repertoire requires a licence” and that “AI service providers must pay the creators appropriate remuneration”.
Most of the big legal disputes between copyright owners and generative AI companies are being fought out in the US, where most of those companies are based and where they train their models.
In those cases, the tech businesses argue that AI training constitutes fair use under American copyright law so they don’t need permission to use existing works as training data. But as those models are commercialised within Europe, European copyright laws become relevant.
GEMA is actually behind two of the big test cases on AI and copyright in Europe, having previously been successful in a separate dispute with Open AI over the use and output of lyrics by ChatGPT. The win against Open AI was also significant, although with Suno being a music-specific AI platform, this ruling seems even more relevant to the wider music industry.
According to GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller, the court in Munich has made one thing “crystal clear”, that “AI models built on stolen IP have no protection under the law” in Europe, which means “AI service providers must pay for licences rather than helping themselves to our members’ works free of charge”.
Today’s ruling, he adds, “has significantly strengthened Europe’s position as a cultural centre”, not least because it demonstrates that “when AI service providers operate their systems in Europe, claims can be brought against them in European courts”.
Other responses to GEMA’s win
The Ivors Academy, which represents songwriters and composers in the UK and Ireland, is among those to have welcomed the ruling, with its Chair Tom Gray thanking GEMA for “putting their money and resources into this important victory for songwriters and composers”.
The outcome is “proof, were it needed”, Gray adds, “that on this side of the Atlantic we have our own rules and our own copyright law”, and therefore “waiting for the USA to produce flawed precedents” on the copyright obligations of AI companies “is not the path”.
He then urges songwriter collecting societies around the world to “take note”. With Anglo-American repertoire it is probably the music publishers that need to take the lead on AI matters, because they likely control the rights that are exploited by AI training. However, across much of the rest of Europe it is the societies that control those rights. Danish society Koda has also launched legal action against Suno.
Although definitely a significant ruling for GEMA and the European music industry more generally, today’s decision is an initial judgement that will almost certainly be appealed.
Suno has already hit back insisting that the German judges have misunderstood both how its technology works and how US copyright law applies to its AI model. That said, the prospect of further litigation in the European courts might make Suno more likely to seek more licensing deals from the music industry.
Suno’s main arguments in court
In court, Suno presented various arguments in a bid to dispute all of GEMA’s claims. It stood by its insistence that the training of its model in the US was covered by the fair use principle, which is the company’s main defence in its legal disputes with the major labels and various independent musicians in the US courts.
It also denied that any training data - including GEMA’s works - is contained or stored in its final model through memorisation. And while GEMA’s team had been able to get Suno to output music almost identical to existing songs like ‘Mambo No 5’ and ‘Daddy Cool’, that was only possible because of a series of “complex, iteratively refined prompts”.
The fact those existing songs could basically be outputted through prompting Suno weighed heavily against the AI company in court, particularly when it came to the allegation of memorisation, and therefore the copying of GEMA works within Germany itself.
A summary of the judgement published by the court explains that “memorisation exists where, in the course of training, the AI models do not merely derive information from the training dataset, but where the parameters specified after training also reflect an appropriation of the content of the training data”.
“Memorisation was established here”, it adds, “by comparing the musical works contained in the training data with their rendition in the outputs. Given the complexity and length of the musical works, coincidence can be excluded as the cause of that rendition”.
Having concluded that memorisation occurred, the judges said that - by storing its model on German servers - Suno had infringed copyright within Europe, and that infringement is not excused by the text and data mining exception in European copyright law.
Moreover, the German judges reckon, the fact GEMA works can be outputted by the Suno model also means the fair use defence for the US-based training does not apply.
It remains to be seen how the US courts rule on Suno’s fair use defence as the American lawsuits go through the motions. Though, depending on how the GEMA claims fair on appeal, Suno may well need to secure licences from the music industry if it wants to operate in Europe, oblivious of whether or not it prevails in the American courts.