AI startup says scraping any song from the internet is ‘fair use’

When most tech companies get sued, the expected defense is to deny wrongdoing. To provide a reasonable explanation for why the company’s actions didn’t break any laws. Music AI startups Udio and Suno have taken a different approach: Admit to doing exactly what you’re being sued for.

Udio and Suno were sued in June, with record labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group alleging that they trained their AI models by scraping copyrighted material from the internet. In a court filing today, Suno admitted that its neural networks did indeed scrape copyrighted material: “It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings on which the Suno model was trained likely included recordings in which the rights are held by Plaintiffs in this case.” That’s because its training data “consists of substantially all reasonably-quality music files that are available on the open internet,” which likely includes millions of illegal copies of songs.

However, the company takes the line that its scraping falls under fair use. “A fair use under copyright law is making copies of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, for the purpose of ultimately creating a non-infringing new product,” the statement reads. Its argument seems to be that because the AI-generated tracks it creates don’t contain samples, illegally obtaining all those tracks in order to train an AI model isn’t a problem.

Calling the defendants’ actions “evasive and misleading,” the RIAA, which initiated the lawsuit, responded with an unexpectedly harsh response. “Their industrial-scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use.’ There is nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its essential value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals,” a spokesperson for the organization said. “Defendants had a ready-made, lawful path to bring their products and tools to market—obtaining consent before using their work, as many of their competitors have already done. This unfair competition is directly at issue in these cases.”

Whatever the next phase of this feud, get your popcorn ready. It should be wild.