Judge lets UMG and Sony accuse Suno of stream ripping their records

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment can now argue that Suno pirated YouTube to build its training data. The two labels filed an amended complaint on Tuesday, August 25 in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, adding a claim under Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Music Business Worldwide's Tim Ingham reported it on August 27.

The claim exists because Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV allowed it. In an order on August 18 he granted the labels leave to bring it. In a second order the same day he refused their separate request to expand the case, turning down a bid to add 61,026 recordings to the 560 already in suit.

The labels first moved to add the stream-ripping claim in September 2025, weeks after Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle a suit over its downloading of pirated books. Suno asked the court to throw it out in October 2025, arguing the statute bars circumventing controls on access to a work rather than controls on copying it, and that YouTube videos are freely available to anyone with a browser.

The complaint describes a specific mechanism. It alleges Suno bypassed YouTube's rolling cipher, an encryption measure the labels say hides the URL of the underlying media file, and names YT-DL and YT-DLP as the tools used to do it. The footnote behind that allegation cites Suno's own supplemental responses to the labels' interrogatories.

According to Saylor's order, Suno told the labels in May 2025 that it had downloaded audio files from YouTube and had used open-source software including those two tools. The labels are not currently claiming that Suno's outputs infringe on their own, unless discovery shows the outputs recapture parts of the copyrighted recordings.

Saylor was careful about how far the ruling goes. Deciding whether Suno actually circumvented a technological measure "will require a developed factual record on how the technological measure and circumvention tools work," he wrote, leaving that for later. The same judge is running a parallel case in which he let an independent artist's class action against Suno go ahead, and Suno's year has also included a German copyright loss to GEMA and two class actions over a user data breach, while Warner sits on the other side of the argument, with Robert Kyncl defending its own Suno deal.