RIAA Says AI Firm’s Response to Copyright Lawsuit Is a ‘Startling Admission of Illegal and Unethical Conduct’
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) torched an AI firm’s response to its lawsuit alleging mass copyright infringement, saying the company is “attempting to construct an alternate reality.”
RIAA filed lawsuits against both Uncharted Labs, Inc., the developer of Udio AI, and Suno, Inc., the developer of Suno AI on Monday. In response to the suit, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman rebuffed the plaintiff’s claims and said that the company prizes “originality” in a statement.
“Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content,” Shulman continued. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists.”
“We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook,” the Suno CEO added.
In response to the statement, an RIAA spokesperson said “If there is any takeaway from Udio’s meandering ‘response,’ it is that Udio is attempting to construct an alternate reality where being pro-artist means stealing artists’ work for profit.”
“Supporting real creativity means getting permission before using someone’s work and developing technology that partners with and supports human artists instead of cutting them out and replacing them,” RIAA added.
The association additionally noted that “Udio now seems to admit their model copied ‘a large collection of recorded music.’ That’s a startling admission of illegal and unethical conduct, and they should be held accountable.”
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs which include Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings and Warner Records, argue that the AI firms have “flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service. Neither [these services] nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
The two lawsuits are seeking for the AI firms to admit that they infringed upon copyrighted sound recordings owned by the plaintiffs, injunctions barring the organizations from infringing on copyrighted material in the future, and damages of up to $150,000 per work, along with other fees.
The lawsuits follow previous legal action filed by UMG, Concord and ABKCO in Oct. against Anthropic, which focused more on copied lyrics.
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