UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
UMG RECORDINGS, INC., CAPITOL RECORDS, LLC, SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, ATLANTIC RECORDING CORPORATION, ATLANTIC RECORDS GROUP LLC, RHINO ENTERTAINMENT LLC, THE ALL BLACKS U.S.A., INC., WARNER MUSIC INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LIMITED, and WARNER RECORDS INC., Plaintiffs, v. SUNO, INC. and JOHN DOES 1-10, Defendant. Civil Action No. 1:24-cv-11611-FDS
ANSWER OF DEFENDANT SUNO, INC. TO COMPLAINT
Defendant Suno, Inc. (“Suno”), by and through its undersigned counsel, hereby answers the complaint filed on June 24, 2024 (the “Complaint”) by Plaintiffs UMG Recordings, Inc., Capitol Records, LLC, Sony Music Entertainment, Atlantic Recording Corporation, Atlantic Records Group LLC, Rhino Entertainment LLC, The All Blacks U.S.A., Inc., Warner Music International Services Limited, and Warner Records Inc. (collectively, “Plaintiffs”).
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT
Suno is an artificial intelligence-powered tool for making new music. It is designed for originality, and that is how real people in the real world use it—to create new songs that didn’t and often couldn’t previously exist. Like a human musician, Suno did not develop its capabilities in a vacuum. It is the product of extensive analysis and study of the building blocks of music: what various genres and styles
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2 sound like; how songs in those genres and styles are harmonized and structured; the characteristic timbres of the instruments and vocalizations in those genres and styles; and so on. Those genres and styles—the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music—are not something that anyone owns. Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself. Notwithstanding those foundational freedoms, the Plaintiffs in this lawsuit seek to shut Suno down. They are a collection of the largest record labels in the world, which collectively dominates the music industry. They frame their concern as one about “copies” of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology—that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don’t want is competition. Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share. Suno will ultimately prevail in this litigation because the values that copyright law embodies and protects are Suno’s values: incentivizing innovation in the service of enabling more expression of more ideas by more people. Plaintiffs’ lawsuit reflects the opposite values: an attempt to misuse IP rights to shield incumbents from competition and reduce the universe of people who are equipped to create new expression.
A.
What Suno Is And How It Works
Suno offers a new technology that allows people to use plain English descriptions of genres, styles, and other musical elements to create new music. For example, a prompt to Suno to generate a song in the style of early 1980s “new wave” synth-pop, with an upbeat tempo but a
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3 somber feel, will in fact—with some iterative refinements from the user—yield an audio file with the characteristic instrumentation, timbres, and overall gestalt of the category described. Users can also instruct the tool to incorporate their own original song lyrics, or new lyrics generated by a different artificial intelligence platform, into the auditory output. The combination of these capabilities makes Suno an engine for effectively limitless creativity. A dutiful grandson can take his grandfather’s poetry and turn it into music whose creation would previously have been out of reach.
1
A legendary rapper whose vocal chords were damaged in a car crash 35 years ago can recreate his old voice and make new music for the first time in decades.
2
The opportunities for new artistic output are endless. The technological foundation of that engine of creation is an underlying model of how music works. The model is a type of computer program known as a “neural network.” It was constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings. From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly
complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings—what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on. Through extensive further refinements, Suno’s engineers were able to provide a tool for virtually anyone to harness the power of that model in the service of generating new music. To be clear, the model underpinning Suno’s service is not a library of pre-existing content, outputting a collage of “samples” stitched together from existing recordings. Instead, it is a vast store of
1
See, e.g.
, https://x.com/AlexFurmansky/status/1811462340686282976.
2
See, e.g.
, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_pU9Hv-UfY.
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