Danish songwriter collecting society Koda has commenced legal action against Suno for copyright infringement, meaning there will be another big music copyright vs AI lawsuit working its way through the European courts.
Announcing the litigation, Koda CEO Gorm Arildsen says, “We are excited about what responsible AI can do for music, but innovation can’t be built on stolen goods. Suno has taken our members’ creative work and fed it into their machines without consent, transparency or remuneration. That is theft – and it threatens the future of music”.
The society has also launched a website setting out its grievances with the AI company, which opens with the headline “the biggest theft in music history”. It is also calling for a “clear, industry-wide standard demanding consent, transparency and remuneration from tech companies using human created protected music for training or generating music”.
Koda follows German society GEMA in suing Suno. Like GEMA, Koda has published examples of tracks generated with Suno which are almost identical to works written by the society’s members, including Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ and Junior Senior’s ‘Move Your Feet’.
So similar are the Suno tracks that there will be copyright infringement claims on both the input – when the original songs were copied during the training of the Suno model – and on the specific outputs.
In addition to the GEMA case in the German courts, Suno is also fighting lawsuits in the US courts, one filed by the major record companies and others filed by independent artists. As is Suno’s main rival Udio – although, of course, Udio last week settled its legal dispute with Universal Music and announced a licensing deal with the major to cover a revamped version of its generative AI platform.
Koda alludes to that in its statement, seeking to counter the argument put forward by some in the AI sector that licensing large catalogues of existing music is just too difficult. “Recent licensing progress between industry actors prove that lawful agreements are in fact possible”, Koda says.
Arildsen continues, “We find it unacceptable that it requires legal action to make Suno and similar AI services pay for the music they use to build a service which they profit from. If the industry wants to foster the future of truly talented artists creating new music, we must protect them. These are the actors most vulnerable to being trampled by big tech. We at Koda refuse to let algorithms shape our cultural history”.
