Independent country musician Tony Justice has filed an amended lawsuit against AI music company Suno, now accusing it of bypassing YouTube‘s anti-piracy technology to build its training dataset.
The expanded complaint (which you can read in full here) was filed in Massachusetts federal court on Monday (September 22) by plaintiffs including Tony Justice, 5th Wheel Records and My Heartland Publishing.
The 68-page document, which nearly tripled in size from the original 24-page filing, accuses Suno of engaging in “stream-ripping” to download copyrighted songs from YouTube. This practice involves bypassing protections and other digital rights management systems designed to prevent unauthorized copying.
The latest allegation follows similar stream-ripping accusations from major record labels filed just three days earlier (September 19), marking a significant escalation in the legal challenges facing the AI music generation startup.
Lawyers for Justice and other plaintiffs wrote: “Upon information and belief, Suno obtained many – if not all – of the songs in its training data by unlawfully downloading them from the website YouTube… through a method of music piracy called ‘stream ripping’.”
They added: “Suno acquired many of the songs it ingested into its AI training model(s) by downloading them directly from streaming platforms such as YouTube and Spotify.”
“To obtain these works, Suno engaged in ‘stream ripping,’ a form of piracy that circumvents encryption, authentication, and other digital rights management (DRM) technologies, thereby bypassing technological protection measures designed to prevent unauthorized copying.”
“Suno acquired many of the songs it ingested into its AI training model(s) by downloading them directly from streaming platforms such as YouTube and Spotify.”
Tony Justice’s amended complaint
“Suno’s dataset is soiled with piracy and misappropriation,” they added, and accused Suno of engaging in “systematic theft” of the music of the plaintiffs and class members.
Justice, who claims credit for creating a “trucker music” genre, originally sued Suno and rival Udio in June. His class action represents independent artists, songwriters, and producers whose works appeared on streaming services since January 1, 2021.
The artist’s allegations center on Suno’s admission that it trained its AI model on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions.”
According to the amended complaint, this included circumventing YouTube’s “rolling cipher” encryption system, which regularly changes access codes to prevent external downloading of videos and audio files.
Suno, valued at about $500 million following a $125 million fundraising, operates a platform that generates music based on user prompts. The company charges subscribers up to $30 per month for its premium service that includes “commercial use rights for songs made while subscribed.”
Justice’s amended complaint also documents instances where Suno’s AI allegedly reproduced copyrighted elements, including “producer tags” that identify parts of the songs of some of the class members. Examples cited include reproductions of tags from CashMoneyAP, Jason Derulo and DJ Mustard, among others.
The lawsuit also alleged that a track generated by Suno had portions that are similar to Michael Bublé’s hit Sway, with an identical version of the opening words, “when marimba rhythms.”
“To obtain these works, Suno engaged in ‘stream ripping,’ a form of piracy that circumvents encryption, authentication, and other digital rights management (DRM) technologies.”
Tony Justice’s amended complaint
Justice’s lawyers wrote: “Suno’s AI model generated eleven (11) additional outputs resembling Sway. These examples demonstrate that Suno’s AI had memorized those original works and reproduced them in new form.”
In addition to the stream-ripping accusations made by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, the record labels’ amended complaint against Suno also accuses the company of engaging in mass piracy to collect the vast amount of music they needed to train their AI model.
The record labels also continue to argue that “fair use” does not apply to AI models that scrape thousands or millions of pieces of copyrighted content to train an AI model that competes directly with the original works.
The amended lawsuits against Suno pose further challenges to the AI company amid the arrival of new rivals in the AI music generation space. Last month, London and New York-headquartered AI audio startup ElevenLabs launched Suno rival Eleven Music, marking its expansion beyond voice synthesis into full AI music generation.
However, as MBW pointed out, unlike Suno and Udio, Eleven Music has already inked licensing agreements with prominent rightsholders, including Merlin and a potentially precedent-setting deal with publisher Kobalt. Yesterday (September 23), ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski confirmed that his company secured strategic investment from chip maker NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company by market cap.
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