AI Startup Claims Scraping All Online Songs Constitutes 'Fair Use'

When faced with a lawsuit, most tech companies typically deny any wrongdoing, aiming to justify their actions as lawful. However, music AI startups Udio and Suno have taken a different route: they openly admit to the practices for which they are being sued.

In June, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group filed lawsuits against Udio and Suno, alleging that the companies trained their AI models by scraping copyrighted materials from the internet. In a recent court filing, Suno acknowledged that its neural networks do indeed utilize copyrighted content, stating, "It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case." The company noted that its training data encompasses "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet," which could include millions of unauthorized copies of songs.

Suno argues that this scraping qualifies as fair use under copyright law. "It is fair use to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, to create a new, non-infringing product," the statement asserts. The company contends that, since AI-generated tracks do not include samples from those works, the use of copyrighted material to train its AI model is permissible.

In response, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which initiated the lawsuit, condemned the defendants' actions as "evading and misleading." A spokesperson stated, "Their industrial-scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use.’ There’s nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals. Defendants had a lawful path to market—obtaining consent before using their work, as many competitors have done. That unfair competition is directly at issue in these cases."