The Recording Industry Association Of America says that legal filings from both Suno and Udio - the music AI companies being sued by the major record companies - include a “major concession”, in that both companies admit that they used - without permission - music owned by the majors to train their respective generative AI models.
The trade body also, unsurprisingly, rejects the fair use defence presented in the new filings, while adopting a similarly forthright tone to that used by the AI businesses and their lawyers.
Suno and Udio’s “vision of the ‘future of music’ is apparently one in which fans will no longer enjoy music by their favourite artists, because those artists can no longer earn a living”, an RIAA spokesperson says. Meanwhile, with their new legal filings, the AI companies “continue to deliberately misinform” and “misdirect” the public.
The major labels sued Suno and Udio for copyright infringement in June. Both companies have now filed responses with the court. They are represented by the same legal teams and, while the preambles are different, the core legal arguments presented by the two AI firms are identical, in many cases word-for-word identical.
They insist that training an AI model with existing content constitutes fair use under US copyright law, meaning they are able to use music owned by the majors without getting permission. They then accuse the majors of anticompetitive conduct which, they allege, constitutes a misuse of copyright.
When the majors filed their lawsuits against Suno and Udio, it wasn’t completely clear what music the two companies had used to train their models, but the record companies were certain the training datasets included their recordings. In their legal filings, both AI companies concede that their datasets “presumably” included major label music.
Seeing that concession as a win, the RIAA says, “after months of evading and misleading, defendants have finally admitted their massive unlicensed copying of artists’ recordings. It’s a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit”.
As for the bombastic fair use defence made by both Suno and Udio this week, the RIAA insists that the two companies’ “industrial scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use’”.
The AI companies cite various legal precedents to back up their fair use arguments, but the RIAA is certain it is in the right. “There’s nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals”, it states, “as the Supreme Court just held in its landmark Warhol Foundation case”.
As for the argument that the majors are acting in an anticompetitive way, exploiting their market dominance to try to force Suno and Udio out of business, well, as the RIAA sees it, it is the AI companies that are being anticompetitive. “Defendants had a ready lawful path to bring their products and tools to the market – obtain consent before using their work, as many of their competitors already have”, it says. “That unfair competition is directly at issue in these cases”.
We knew that Suno and Udio’s primary defence would be fair use, and that the majors would strongly reject that defence. Which means, beyond the concession that major label music was used to train the two AI firms’ models, we’ve not got that much more information from this week’s legal filings and the RIAA’s response. However, the forthright tone being adopted by all parties at least makes things quite entertaining.
