According to court documents, AI music companies Suno and Udio have hired top law firm Latham & Watkins to defend against a lawsuit filed in late June by the three major record labels.
The lawsuit, filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group (UMG), alleges that Snow and Udio illegally copied the labels' recordings and trained AI models to produce music that “saturates the market with machine-generated content, which directly competes with, devalues and potentially drowns out authentic recordings.” [the services were] was built.
Latham & Watkins has already played a key role in defending some of the top companies in the artificial intelligence field, including the firm's work defending Anthropic against copyright infringement claims brought by UMG, Concord Music Group and ABKCO last October. Latham has also represented OpenAI in all lawsuits brought by authors and other rights holders, including a lawsuit brought by The New York Times and a lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors.
The Latham team is led by Andrew Gass, Steve Feldman, Sy Damle, Britt Lovejoy and Nate Taylor. Plaintiffs UMG, WMG and Sony Music are represented by Mose Kaba, Mariah Rivera, Alexander Perry and Robert Krieger of Houston Hennigan, and Daniel Cloherty of Cloherty & Steinberg.
AI companies typically argue that their training is protected by copyright's fair use doctrine, an important rule that allows protected works to be reused without violating the law, and that's likely to be a core part of Latham's defense of Suno and Udio's practices. While fair use has historically allowed things like news reporting and parody, AI companies argue that it applies just as much when building machines that use millions of works “in-between” to produce entirely new works.
So far, Suno and Udio have declined to comment on whether they used unauthorized copyrights in their datasets. But the music industry began questioning the contents of the datasets after a series of articles written by Ed Newton-Rex, founder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, was published in Music Business Worldwide. In one of the articles, Newton-Rex said that he was able to generate music from both Suno and Udio that was “strikingly similar to copyrighted music.”
The lawsuit cites circumstantial evidence to support the labels' belief that Suno and Udio used their own copyrighted material to train the AI, including output generated by Suno and Udio that sounds like the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA, impersonating producers Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo, and output that sounds nearly identical to Mariah Carey's “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys' “I Get Around,” ABBA's “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations' “My Girl,” and Green Day's “American Idiot.”