Universal Music and Sony Music filed an updated version of their copyright lawsuit against music AI company Suno this week, complete with the stream ripping arguments that they’ve been wanting to add to the litigation since last September.
“Suno acquired many - if not all - of the copyrighted sound recordings in its training data by illicitly downloading them from YouTube using a notorious method of music piracy known as ‘stream ripping’”, the updated lawsuit states.
That amended complaint was filed on Tuesday following rulings earlier this month by Judge F Dennis Saylor on requests made by the music companies to make two big amends to their Suno lawsuit. As well as adding the stream ripping arguments, the majors also wanted to boost the list of named copyright protected works allegedly infringed by the AI company by more than 60,000 tracks.
With those two amends, Universal and Sony hoped to make their copyright claims against Suno stronger and to massively boost the potential damages the AI company could be forced to pay if it loses the case to more than $9 billion.
The hope being that, with stronger legal arguments and a potential $9 billion damages bill, Suno would be much more likely to settle the case and to enter into licensing deals with the two majors, which will likely involve the AI company making various changes to its business model.
Saylor refused to allow the majors to massively increase the number of named tracks allegedly infringed by Suno. Doing so, he said, would have “obvious consequences of complexity and delay”, and “such additional complexity and delay” this late in the proceedings “will likely prejudice Suno”.
However, despite Suno raising technical and legal objections to the majors’ stream ripping claims - insisting it didn’t violate any laws when ripping audio off YouTube - Saylor said that the music companies could add those claims to their lawsuit.
The judge conceded that assessing whether Suno unlawfully ripped recordings from YouTube, by circumventing YouTube’s technical protection measures in violation of US copyright rules, will require more analysis of how YouTube’s “technological measures” and Suno’s “circumvention tools” work.
However, for now, Universal and Sony’s stream ripping allegations constitute a “plausible claim for violation” of section 1201 of the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Adding the stream ripping claims is important for Universal and Sony because of a key ruling in another AI copyright case in the US courts involving a group of authors and Anthropic.
In that case, the judge accepted Anthropic’s argument that AI training was fair use under US copyright law, meaning it didn’t need to get permission from the authors or their publishers to make copies of their books as part of its training processes.
But only if Anthropic started with legitimately sourced copies of those books. Anthropic hadn’t done that, having instead relied on millions of pirated ebooks to build its training dataset. That fact prompted a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and the authors.
While the music industry continues to argue that AI training is never fair use, given the precedent set in the Anthropic case, Universal and Sony have stronger arguments if they can show Suno started with pirated copies of their recordings. Hence the need to demonstrate that Suno ripping all those tracks off the YouTube platform was unlawful.
As for the bid to add more tracks to the list of infringed works, that’s because under US copyright law a copyright owner can seek damages of up to $150,000 for every infringed work.
Universal and Sony’s original lawsuit listed 560 allegedly infringed tracks, which could result in $84 million in damages if the majors are successful. Had they been able to increase the list to 61,026 - as they requested - potential damages would have topped $9.1 billion.
Although Saylor won’t allow the majors to boost the track list in this lawsuit, he did acknowledge that they could simply file a second separate lawsuit in relation to all the other works. Which they may well do. When another judge declined to allow Sony to add more tracks to its separate copyright lawsuit against Suno rival Udio, it quickly submitted a second lawsuit covering the extra recordings.