Judge lets country artist Tony Justice take his Suno class action to discovery

Tony Justice, a country artist suing the AI music company Suno, has cleared the first real hurdle in his proposed class action. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV denied Suno's motion to dismiss on two of the three counts it challenged, in an order issued on August 20 in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and Music Business Worldwide's Mandy Dalugdug reported the ruling on August 27.

Justice and his co-plaintiffs are independent recording artists and artist-owned entities holding copyrights in both compositions and recordings. They say Suno pulled their songs off YouTube, copied them into its training data, and now generates music that reproduces protected parts of their work. Count 1, a straight reproduction claim, was never challenged, so it was always going forward.

The contested count was the derivative-works claim. Suno argued the complaint had to point at specific outputs that were substantially similar to the plaintiffs' own songs, and that it had not. Saylor disagreed on the standard: there is no categorical requirement that a plaintiff produce the derivative work at the motion to dismiss stage, he wrote.

What the amended complaint does carry is roughly 100 examples of outputs that replicate or resemble songs owned by other rightsholders, plus remarks from Suno's own chief executive about the model's ability to reproduce real artists' vocals. That was enough for the judge to call it a plausible inference that the same thing has happened to these plaintiffs, with proof left to discovery. He also brushed aside Suno's suggestion that the artists could simply use the tool themselves to hunt for infringing output, noting in a footnote that what the tool can now do is a separate question from what Suno has already done with it.

The third count is the stream-ripping claim under Section 1201(a)(1) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The plaintiffs say YouTube uses a rolling cipher to block external access to its videos and that Suno used a stream-ripping tool to get past it. Saylor pointed to his own ruling two days earlier in the major labels' parallel case against the same company, where he found the identical allegations plausible and said the technical questions need a developed factual record.

Only the fourth count died, and it died quietly. The plaintiffs told the court their citation to the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act had been inadvertent and that they had meant to plead a common-law unfair competition claim instead. The suit now proceeds on three counts. Suno is fighting on several fronts at once, having already been hit with class actions over a user data breach and beaten by GEMA in a German copyright ruling. More from the same corner of country is on the hub.