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Suno has fired back against the majors’ amended copyright suit, the central stream-ripping claim in which is allegedly a “futile” attempt to pivot due to the “burgeoning consensus” that training on protected works constitutes fair use.

Cambridge-headquartered Suno just recently took aim at the proposed amended complaint, which we broke down at the time of its late-September filing. In brief, the RIAA-corralled plaintiffs’ retooled action is accusing Suno of circumventing YouTube’s “rolling cipher” content-protection measure to “stream rip” audio for training purposes.

Among other things, the alleged maneuver is “a form of music piracy prohibited by YouTube’s terms of service” and a violation of the DMCA, according to the majors, which also amended a similar-but-separate complaint against Udio.

As many know, the fresh allegations followed (besides some new evidence of the alleged stream ripping) public confirmation of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors. Technically, said settlement will cover the AI giant’s alleged piracy of books – not the actual process of training on them, which the court found to constitute fair use.

After beginning by reiterating the point, Suno’s opposition to the proposed amended suit dives directly into the language of section 1201 of the DMCA.

Penned well before AI burst onto the scene, of course, that decades-old section says no individual “shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work.”

And in Suno’s view, while the section therefore “prohibits the act of circumventing access controls…it does not prohibit the act of circumventing copy controls.” That’s important because the plaintiffs’ claims are said to “plainly concern copy controls” as opposed to the access counterpart.

What, then, is the difference between access and copy controls? Well, in keeping with the names – and as described in much greater detail, complete with a good dose of legislative history, in the legal text – the former are said to limit access to content (like passwords on subscription platforms), with the latter pertaining to the use of content after it’s been lawfully accessed in the first place.

Moreover, section 1201 allegedly bars the circumvention of access controls but not copy controls.

Because the majors have allegedly taken issue not with Suno’s accessing the publicly available YouTube, but with its allegedly downloading media from the video-sharing platform, the AI defendant is purportedly in the clear when it comes to the new claim.

“In short,” Suno’s retort reads, “the fact pattern Plaintiffs describe here is the precise scenario that the legislative history of the DMCA, reflected in the basic structure of the statute, indicates should fall outside the prohibitions of section 1201.”

Furthermore, should the majors change gears by arguing that the rolling cipher is an access control in that it bars access “to the underlying digital file from which a YouTube stream is generated,” the argument would also allegedly fail.

“Plaintiffs themselves have been adamant that the purpose and effect of the ‘rolling cipher’ is to prohibit downloading. … A copy control does not become an access control simply by hiding the underlying file, when the content of that file is streamed for everyone in the world to see and hear on demand whenever they want it,” the opposition states.

Finally, in a throwback to standalone stream-ripping litigation, the text maintains that a “currently on appeal” decision in Yout’s case against the RIAA “is of limited utility here” because the court “did not meaningfully engage with the question of whether a rolling cipher is an access control or a copy control.”

At the time of this writing, Suno didn’t appear to have responded to the similar arguments levied against it in a different infringement complaint, filed this time by artists themselves. But a follow up is presumably forthcoming there and in amended litigation against Udio.

 

Article Originally Posted on www.digitalmusicnews.com