Court filings: AI startups Suno and Udio respond to copyright lawsuits from major music labels, saying using proprietary music to train AI models is fair use
In their first responses to the sweeping copyright lawsuits that could define AI music, lawyers for Suno and Udio don't exactly hold back.
BillboardBill Donahue
Context & Ripple Effects
The labels’ case began with the RIAA’s allegations of mass infringement against both services, putting the provenance of training music—not merely generated tracks—at the center of the dispute. Suno and Udio’s filings turn that challenge into a direct fair-use defense against the RIAA’s initial lawsuit.
Suno and Udio formally place fair use at the core of their defense, seeking to preserve their ability to train models on proprietary recordings without obtaining licenses first.
The major labels must now litigate not only alleged copying, but whether model training itself can be treated as a legally permitted use of their catalogs.
Second-order effects
The case increases pressure on AI-music companies to clarify the sources and permissions behind training data, since their legal exposure may hinge on those practices.
Licensing becomes a parallel bargaining channel: labels can seek paid access and safeguards while startups weigh negotiated certainty against defending a broad fair-use position.
Third-order effects
If courts reject broad fair-use arguments for proprietary music training, licensed catalogs and verifiable data provenance could become durable competitive inputs for AI-music products.
If the defense prevails, rights holders may have less control over training use and may shift their leverage toward output-level claims, platform rules, and commercial partnerships.
The trend: Generative-media companies and rights holders are moving toward a defining contest over whether copyrighted works are licensable training inputs or material eligible for fair-use treatment.
Wow! I mean, guess they gotta try something, bit this looks like open and shut ‘derivative works’ to me, a layperson content creator. 🤷♂️ [embedded post]
We're filing our response to the members of the RIAA today. It's important to understand additional context around our mission and what is at stake. You can read more about it on the suno blog ( https://suno.com/...) or below
If its's against their policies to use real artists as prompts, then why, in this presentation to venture capitalists, is @suno_ai_ co-founder caught on video using ‘Hendrix’ as a prompt to demonstrate the platform's capabilities? 👀 https://www.youtube.com/... [image]
A stunning sentence: “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” https://www.404media.co/..…
Suno and Udio have both responded to the RIAA's lawsuits. In amongst the defenses they put forward, they both admit that the recordings they trained on “presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the [major record labels]”. While they say this is “no secret”, I [ima…
Suno's mission is to make it possible for everyone to make music. We imagine a future where music is a bigger, more valuable, and more meaningful part of people's lives than it even is today. Technology enables a future where the whole world can explore, create, and be active [vi…
Suno and Udio have answered the record labels' copyright complaints against them, and their long-winded preambles are pure sophistry. The labels' premise is not that they own genres of music, but that these AI gremlins copied the recordings. Straw man at its most obvious. [image]
It's hilarious to think that a generative AI startup's best defence when taken to court is “well they've got all the rights and it's not fair so we plagiarised because that's what fair use is now” The mental gymnastics to avoid admitting theft is nuts. https://chatgptiseatingthew…