German collecting society GEMA has launched a major legal battle against AI music platform Suno, claiming that its team was able to generate tracks using Suno’s AI that were so similar to existing works by some of Germany’s most prominent artists that the outputs themselves constitute copyright infringement.
The lawsuit, filed in the Munich Regional Court, claims that Suno “outputs content that obviously infringes copyrights”, going on to list specific outputs which, it says, “largely correspond” - in terms of “melody, harmony and rhythm” - to “world-famous works” created by GEMA represented songwriters including Alphaville, Frank Farian, Kristina Bach, Lou Bega and Modern Talking.
To support its claims, GEMA musicologist Julia Blum has carried out an analysis of specific examples, setting out similarities between two Suno-generated tracks and two specific songs written by GEMA members: ‘Daddy Cool’, recorded by Boney M and written by producer Frank Farian, and ‘Forever Young’, written and performed by the members of Alphaville. A summary of her work is published on the society’s website.
Those similarities are in part used as proof that the AI company has ingested large quantities of existing but unlicensed music in order to train its AI model. Although, as GEMA also notes, Suno has admitted as much already, both in filings relating to another lawsuit and in a recent interview given by CEO Mikey Shulman.
However, beyond what data may have been used to train Suno’s AI models, the Suno-generated outputs are important to the litigation in their own right because of the allegation they directly infringe the copyright in the works they resemble.
GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller says that “AI providers such as Suno” not only “use our members’ works without their consent and profit financially from them”, but that music generated by the AI platform “competes with the works created by humans and deprives them of their economic basis”.
“GEMA is endeavouring to find solutions in partnership with the AI companies”, he adds, “but this will not work without adhering to the necessary basic rules of fair cooperation and, above all, it will not work without the acquisition of licences”.
Most of the lawsuits filed by copyright owners against AI companies, including the record industry’s lawsuit against Suno, have been filed with courts in the US.
Many AI companies argue that using existing content to train a generative AI model constitutes fair use under American copyright law, meaning they do not need to get permission from any copyright owners. The copyright industries, including the music industry, do not agree.
GEMA’s litigation tests the copyright obligations of AI companies under German and European law. This is the second lawsuit brought against an AI company by GEMA. It previously filed legal action against OpenAI, alleging that the AI company had used GEMA members’ lyrics to train ChatGPT without getting permission.
When it filed that lawsuit, GEMA noted that “the legal situation in the USA differs from that in Europe”, insisting that under European law - while there is a text and data mining copyright exception AI companies can rely on - that does not apply to works where the copyright owner has formally reserved their rights. As a result, AI training in Europe is “expressly and clearly regulated”, and AI companies “may not train AI using protected works for which a reservation of rights has been declared” without negotiating a licence.
A number of previous lawsuits against AI companies have, like with GEMA’s Suno lawsuit, alleged copyright infringement on both the input and output of an AI model. Which is to say copyright was infringed when works were inputted into a training dataset, and again when works were outputted that are very similar to existing works, like with GEMA’s ‘Daddy Cool’ and ‘Forever Young’ examples.
On the output, GEMA argues that both the reproduction and making available elements of the copyright are being exploited. That would be a particularly important distinction in countries like the UK, where - with song copyrights - usually music publishers control reproduction while collecting society PRS controls making available. Although, in Germany, GEMA controls both elements of its members’ copyrights.
The outputs of an AI model were also raised in another legal battle involving the music industry, the one between a group of music publishers in the US and Anthropic.
The publishers claimed they were able to use Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to output lyrics they own. Anthropic argued that that was the result of a bug in the system, adding that guardrails had been put in place to stop that from happening in the future. It then made a legal commitment to keep those guardrails in place after the publishers sought a court order to that effect.
Suno will no doubt submit a bullish response to GEMA’s lawsuit, as it did to the record industry’s litigation in the US. However, it will likely present different arguments regarding the infringement claims on the output as compared to the input. We will also see how its arguments differ in the context of European rather than US law.
