Copyright Allegations
Sony and Universal Music Group filed another lawsuit against AI music platform Suno, claiming that its new v6 model continues to infringe on their copyrights because it was trained on user outputs derived from earlier models built on unlicensed source material.
Sony and UMG are suing Suno again
The latest legal action accuses the AI developer of practicing model laundering to bypass copyright restrictions.
Suno’s AI vocalists could learn a thing or two from this glitchy image.
The Model Laundering Claim
In the court complaint, the major music labels outline the mechanism of model laundering:
Training a new model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of protected expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6. The labels argue that v6 remains the fruit of the poisoned tree.
Training Data Disputes
When v6 launched, company representatives stated it was built from the ground up using a new dataset that included user data, though they declined to provide further details regarding the exact composition of the training sets.
Sony's legal filing further alleges that Suno utilized knowledge distillation techniques to train the v6 software, teaching it to replicate the performance of previous teacher models that relied on unauthorized copyrighted material.
The complaint asserts that any model informed by or benefiting from prior unauthorized copies remains tied to the initial copyright infringement unless built completely from scratch.
