AI startup says downloading songs from the internet is ‘fair use’

What is the story

Music AI startups Udio and Suno are currently locked in legal battles with major music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group.

The lawsuits were filed in June this year, alleging that the companies trained their AI models using copyrighted content downloaded from the internet.

Suno openly admitted to the court that its AI bots do indeed obtain copyrighted works for training purposes, but justified their actions as “fair use.”

Suno’s AI model has been trained on millions of copyrighted recordings

In court documents, Suno admitted that its AI model was trained on tens of millions of recordings, some of which likely belong to the plaintiffs in the case.

The company explained that its training data includes virtually all reasonable-quality music files available on the open internet.

This collection potentially includes millions of unauthorized copies of music.

Despite this admission, Suno maintains that its actions are protected by fair use.

Suno defends its actions as part of a ‘backend technology process’

“Fair use under copyright law is the creation of a copy of a protected work through a back-end technological process, in a way that is invisible to the public, for the purpose of creating a new product that ultimately does not infringe the copyright,” Suno said.

This defense is based on the assumption that since the AI-generated songs do not contain samples from the original songs, obtaining these songs for training the AI model is not problematic.

Industry body rejects Sono’s ‘fair use’ defence

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which initiated the lawsuit, vehemently rejected Suno’s defense.

A spokesperson for the organization called the defendants’ actions “evasive and misleading” and argued that “industrial-scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use.'”

Industry groups also criticized Udio and Suno for failing to obtain consent before using artists’ work, stating that many of their competitors had already done so.