Universal Music and Sony add stream-ripping claims to their Suno suit

Universal Music and Sony Music have filed an updated copyright complaint against the AI music company Suno, adding the stream-ripping allegations they have been trying to introduce since last September. The amended complaint landed on Tuesday.

The new version claims Suno obtained many, if not all, of the copyrighted recordings in its training data by illicitly downloading them from YouTube. The labels frame that as piracy rather than a technical shortcut, and it is the piece of the case that could decide the rest of it.

Judge F Dennis Saylor ruled on two requests earlier in the month and split them. He let the stream-ripping claims in, finding they made a plausible claim under section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, while conceding that working out whether Suno circumvented YouTube's technical protections will need more analysis.

He refused the second request. The majors wanted to grow the list of named infringed works from 560 tracks to 61,026, which would have lifted potential statutory damages from around 84 million dollars to more than 9.1 billion. Saylor said the added complexity and delay would likely prejudice Suno this late in the case.

The reason the labels want the piracy angle traces to a different courtroom. In the US case brought by authors against Anthropic, the judge accepted that AI training was fair use, but only where the training copies were legitimately sourced. Anthropic had used millions of pirated ebooks, and settled for 1.5 billion dollars.

So while the industry continues to argue that training is never fair use, Universal and Sony are in a stronger position if they can show Suno started from pirated copies. That is the whole point of proving the YouTube rips were unlawful.

Saylor did note the majors could file a separate second lawsuit covering the other works, and there is precedent: when a judge blocked Sony from adding tracks to its case against Udio, it filed again. The case sits alongside GEMA's German copyright win over Suno Sony's separate suit against Udio and BMG's decision to license Suno rather than sue it.