SOCAN sues the AI music platform Suno over Canadian songs

SOCAN has taken the generative AI platform Suno to court, escalating a fight the Canadian rights organisation has been building for more than a year.

The claim is that Suno trained its models on human-created music without consent or payment, including works registered with SOCAN. According to a press release, the organisation has identified Suno outputs that are similar or identical to songs in its catalogue, with no credit or compensation given to the writers behind them.

"The evidence shows that the Suno platform has generated and streamed outputs that copy works in our repertoire, and that cannot go unchallenged," said SOCAN chief executive Jennifer Brown, adding that innovation cannot come at the expense of human creativity.

The suit names 150 Suno songs that appear to draw on Canadian works. Among the originals listed are Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now", Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway", Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" and Alexisonfire's "Passing Out in America", a spread that runs from folk standard to hardcore.

It is not an isolated action. In the United States, Jason Isbell has just filed a similar lawsuit against Suno on behalf of himself and a group of other musicians, and the platform has already lost a German copyright case brought by GEMA, while a parallel case against the AI firm Udio has moved to New York.

SOCAN has been working the licensing side of the same problem in parallel. Over the summer it announced a partnership with a company called Musical AI to push for songwriters to be able to choose whether their music trains AI models, and to be paid when it does, which is the arrangement BMG has already struck with Suno directly.