Suno Loses Landmark AI Lawsuit to German Performing Rights Society GEMA
German music collection society GEMA notched another major legal victory in its campaign to rein in AI companies’ use of copyrighted material on Friday,...
Key points
- German music collection society GEMA notched another major legal victory in its campaign to rein in AI companies’ use of copyrighted material on Friday, winning the case it brought against the generative music platform Suno.
- While specifics of the ruling from the Munich Regional Court German legal proceedings were not made public, its decision requires AI companies to pay to license material “for the systematic use of GEMA’s repertoire and its commercial exploitation,” a press release from GEMA reads.
- GEMA, which has around 100,000 members, also argued that Suno “ingested” those members’ works to train its models, but did not license the material – which Suno had partially admitted to back in 2024.
- “Suno’s training data includes 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,” Suno wrote in a 2024 court filing in a different case, brought against it in the U.S.
What happened
German music collection society GEMA notched another major legal victory in its campaign to rein in AI companies’ use of copyrighted material on Friday, winning the case it brought against the generative music platform Suno. While specifics of the ruling from the Munich Regional Court German legal proceedings were not made public, its decision requires AI companies to pay to license material “for the systematic use of GEMA’s repertoire and its commercial exploitation,” a press release from GEMA reads. GEMA, which has around 100,000 members, also argued that Suno “ingested” those members’ works to train its models, but did not license the material – which Suno had partially admitted to back in 2024. “Suno’s training data includes 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,” Suno wrote in a 2024 court filing in a different case, brought against it in the U.S. In the U.S., fair use allows for the use of copyrighted material without a license as long as the result meets certain criteria, including transforming something into a...