By: Jasmine Tang

Major music companies like Sony, Warner, and Universal, sued two artificial intelligence music companies on June 24. The companies were sued for copyrighted sounds and songs to create their product.

The companies that got taken to court are called Udio and Suno, which let users make songs with only a few words.

Companies are now using A.I. for a financial benefit. But other music companies argue that the only reason A.I. can create songs is because they were trained with sounds and songs owned by record labels.

“The foundation of its business has been to exploit copyrighted sound recordings without permission,” argued the lawsuits against Udio and Suno in court.

“Building and operating a service like Udio’s requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to train a software model to generate outputs,” one of the lawsuits against the A.I. technology said. “For Udio specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings.”

“These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,” stated Ken Doroshow, the chief legal officer of the Recording Industry Association of America.

He also added, “These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical and lawful development of generative A.I. systems.”

Udio denied the charges against its company, and the way they train their A.I.

In an email, Mikey Shulman defended his company, Suno.

“Suno is built for new music, new uses and new musicians,” said Shulman. “We prize originality.”

Marc Tracy. “Major Record Labels Sue A.I. Music Generators” New York Times, 25 June. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/arts/music/record-labels-ai-lawsuit-sony-universal-warner.html?searchResultPosition=2