Photo credit: Steve Johnson
As their legal battle with major record labels begins to intensify, two music AI startups have hired Latham & Watkins, which also represents Open AI and Anthropic.
GenAI's music startups Suno and Udio have hired the elite law firm Latham & Watkins, which also represents Open AI and Anthropic, to defend themselves against a lawsuit filed in late June by the Big Three (Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group).
The lawsuit filed by Sony, WMG and UMG alleges that Udio and Suno are illegally copying the labels' recordings to train AI models to generate music, “saturating the market with machine-generated content that directly competes with, devalues and potentially drowns out authentic recordings.” [the labels were] was built.
Latham's team representing the AI companies is led by Andrew Gass, Steve Feldman, Sy Damle, Britt Lovejoy and Nate Taylor. The plaintiff labels are represented by Moez Kaba, Mariah Rivera, Alexander Perry and Robert Klieger of Hueston Hennigan, and Daniel Cloherty of Cloherty & Steinberg.
Latham & Watkins has played a key role in defending companies in the artificial intelligence space, including defending Anthropic against copyright infringement claims brought by UMG and Concord Music last year. The firm also represents Open AI in a number of lawsuits filed against the company, including a lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman and other writers, and a lawsuit brought against the company by The New York Times.
The fair use defense is a common defense used by AI companies in copyright litigation because it allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission under certain conditions. It will undoubtedly be a key part of Latham & Watkins' case against Suno and Udio's activities. While fair use has historically applied to things like parody and news reporting, the AI companies argue that it applies equally to creating a platform for the “intermediate” use of millions of other people's works to generate new works.
It remains to be seen how well these arguments will hold up once legal proceedings begin. The music industry has long criticized these and other AI companies for the datasets they use and whether they contain unauthorized copyrights. In a series of articles written by Ed Newton-Rex of the AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, he detailed how both Udio and Suno were able to generate music that was “strikingly similar” to copyrighted music by Jason Derulo, the Jackson 5, Mariah Carey, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Temptations, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others.