Sony Music and Universal Music Group have filed a new lawsuit against the AI music service Suno. The plaintiffs claim that the company's latest model, v6, infringes on their copyrights by utilizing data derived from previous AI models that were trained on unlicensed music from platforms like YouTube.
Suno's Chief Product Officer, Jack Brody, stated that the v6 model was trained from scratch on a new dataset, which includes user-generated content. However, the music labels argue that training a new model on the output of a previous infringing model does not resolve the copyright violation, but rather launders the unauthorized data.
The lawsuit alleges that Suno employed a technique known as distillation to train v6, enabling the model to replicate the outputs of earlier systems built on illegally obtained data. Sony and UMG contend that the model continues to benefit from unauthorized copies held by Suno.
The plaintiffs maintain that unless Suno begins training its models entirely from scratch without using compromised data, its products will remain based on stolen content. Currently, Suno does not hold any licensing agreements with Sony or Universal Music Group.
