{"id":568761,"date":"2026-07-31T14:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T14:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/568761\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T14:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T14:46:09","slug":"suno-loses-landmark-ai-case-to-gema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/568761\/","title":{"rendered":"Suno Loses Landmark AI Case to GEMA"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGerman music collection society GEMA notched another major legal victory in its campaign to rein in AI companies\u2019 use of copyrighted material<\/a> on Friday, winning the case it brought against the generative music platform Suno<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Munich Regional Court has ruled that Suno is in breach of German and U.S. copyright law by training its AI systems on songs from GEMA\u2019s repertoire and storing and reproducing them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile 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 \u201cfor the systematic use of GEMA\u2019s repertoire and its commercial exploitation,\u201d a press release from GEMA reads. The decision covers that use across both model training and output generation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cToday, the Chamber made one thing crystal clear: AI models built on stolen intellectual property have no protection under the law. AI service providers must pay for licenses rather than helping themselves to our members\u2019 works free of charge,\u201d a statement from GEMA\u2019s CEO, Dr Tobias Holzm\u00fcller, reads. \u201cToday, the court\u2019s verdict has significantly strengthened Europe\u2019s position as a cultural centre.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe society had accused the Massachusetts-based Suno of infringement over just six songs \u2013 \u201cAtemlos,\u201d \u201cDaddy Cool,\u201d \u201cRasputin,\u201d \u201cBig in Japan,\u201d \u201cForever Young,\u201d and \u201cMambo No. 5.\u201d \u2013 which GEMA said it had been able to essentially reproduce on Suno through basic prompting, despite the platform\u2019s purpose and business model being to generate \u201cnew\u201d sound-based material for users.<\/p>\n

\n\tGEMA, which has around 100,000 members, also argued that Suno \u201cingested\u201d those members\u2019 works to train its models, but did not license the material \u2013 which Suno had partially admitted to back in 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSuno\u2019s 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,\u201d Suno wrote in a 2024 court filing in a different case, brought against it in the U.S. by the three major labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group. (The latter reached a licensing agreement with Suno last Nov., but the other two majors remain plaintiffs in the case, which should be decided sometime next year.<\/p>\n

\n\tContacted for comment by Variety, a rep for Suno said: \u201cWe built Suno around a core belief: to empower everyone to experience the joy of making music. Our tools give people the ability to create new songs, whether they are top artists, product developers, songwriters using our tools in their workflows or everyday music fans. From the beginning, we trained our models to create new songs, not reproduce existing ones, and built protections into our platform. We disagree with today\u2019s ruling \u2013 which rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of how Suno\u2019s technology works, how it is used and how U.S. law applies \u2014 and are evaluating all available options, including an appeal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe victory comes roughly nine months after GEMA won another important AI-related lawsuit against OpenAI, which was found to have trained its models on unlicensed lyrics. GEMA was awarded unspecified damages in the OpenAI case, but the organization\u2019s overarching goal has been to establish a legal framework in the E.U. that reckons with AI companies\u2019 prior use of copyrighted material and creates a path for that usage moving forward. To that end, GEMA has released a proposed licensing system for AI companies\u2019 use of music, as well as a charter laying out several approaches to peoples\u2019 use of AI generally.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn large part, AI companies\u2019 defense has been that their ingestion of all this material \u2013 books, videos, music, articles, visual art and more \u2013 in order to train the models that power their platforms has all fallen under the umbrella of fair use. 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 new, original work \u2013 which, AI companies argue, is exactly what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

\n\tCopyright holders argue that these companies wouldn\u2019t exist at all without their work \u2013 as ABBA\u2019s Bj\u00f6rn Ulvaeus, who is currently the president of international rights society CISAC, put it in a recent speech: \u201cThese tools are extraordinary, but they could not have been built without us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSuno recently raised $400 million in its Series D round, putting the company\u2019s valuation at $5.4 billion.<\/p>\n

\n\tA recent case against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude platform valued at nearly $1 trillion, recently concluded with the company being ordered to pay the largest copyright settlement in American history, $1.5 billion, to a collective of authors. The judge in that case found that Anthropic\u2019s training on their work was fair use \u2013 but that the company had pirated that work in order to do so.<\/p>\n

\n\tSuno allegedly did the same thing, according to a recent report from 404 Media covering a hack of Suno\u2019s internal data, which seemed to indicate that Suno illegally scraped material from YouTube.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother as-yet-untested avenue of attack for rightsholders around fair use as regards AI centers on whether the unlicensed use of a work hurts the current or future market for the original \u2013 what\u2019s called \u201cmarket dilution.\u201d If it is proven that Suno has had a material impact on the overall streaming market for music, it could result in something of an existential crisis for nascent, creative-generative platforms.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, some argue that the genie is out of the bottle. \u201cRather than getting upset about the potentially lost cause of training data, maybe this is a time to think about what you want the world to look like, factoring we will live with increasingly powerful AI models at our fingertips, should we choose to use them,\u201d the artist and researcher Matt Dryhurst wrote in a recent essay on music being used in AI training.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMusic doesn\u2019t stop. Neither do we,\u201d writes Suno on its website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German music collection society GEMA notched another major legal victory in its campaign to rein in AI companies\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,71015],"class_list":["post-568761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-suno"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}