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Those complaints just recently made their way to an Illinois federal court, with one action naming Udio/Uncharted Labs (erroneously sued as Unchartered Labs) as the lone defendant and the other taking aim at Suno.

Both suits span approximately 100 pages apiece and count as plaintiffs the namesake company behind R&B band Attack the Sound, “father-and-son songwriting and recording duo” Stan and James Burjek, and the members of a Chicago-based group called Directrix.

In other words, like the major labels’ suits against Suno and Udio as well as musician Tony Justice’s complaints against the same entities, there’s plenty of overlap between the actions. There’s also quite a bit of depth to today’s suits, which, at the top level, call out the alleged infringement of recordings and compositions alike.

“Besides copying entire sound recordings,” one pertinent section maintains, “Udio also copied, tokenized, and indexed lyrics on a large scale. Udio extensively scraped lyric content from sources like Common Crawl, which includes databases such as Genius, AZLyrics, Lyrics.com, and Musixmatch, without securing the necessary licenses for lyric display or reproduction that are readily available in the market.”

Of course, these claims are especially significant in light of the massive settlement Anthropic finalized with authors whose books it allegedly pirated. Meanwhile, the majors and Justice updated their suits to accuse Suno as well as Udio of bypassing YouTube’s “rolling cipher” anti-piracy technology to download recordings for training purposes.

Unsurprisingly, then, the new actions likewise contain DMCA and stream-ripping claims.

“Suno obtained many of the copyrighted sound recordings in its training set by illicitly downloading them from YouTube using ‘stream-ripping,’ a well-known method of music piracy,” the appropriate text reads.

Interestingly, however, they take things even further than that by calling out the allegedly stream-ripped works’ non-training usages internally and by third-party contractors.

“Suno did not stop at stream-ripping and copying,” the suit alleges. “On information and belief, Suno maintains centralized, persistent corpora of audio and lyric files, separate from transient training shards, that engineers can and do access to make additional copies for evaluation, ablation testing, alignment, red-teaming, and fine-tuning iterations. These corpora include works Suno scraped without authorization.”

“Suno staff and contractors had search and browse access to these corpora, and Suno lacks a copy accounting or deletion protocol, resulting in unbounded downstream copying,” the document claims.

“Where Suno initially acquired recordings/lyrics from pirated/shadow-library sources or streams defeated by circumvention, those copies were retained and repurposed even when alternative sources later became available. Retention and repurposing of such pirated copies is not excused by any claim of ‘training’ fair use,” the complaint continues.

Another noteworthy element of the just-submitted actions: The purported market dilution stemming from the AI developer defendants’ alleged infringement.

“Udio’s unlicensed copying causes cognizable market substitution and dilution in multiple, well-defined music markets, even where any given AI output is not a near-verbatim copy, because Udio’s product supplies close substitutes at scale and is purposely designed and marketed to replace licensed music acquisition and production,” one sentence spells out.

Among several different things, the dilution and substitution fallout encompasses reduced streaming royalties, a smaller chance of reaching fans on streaming, lessened sync opportunities, and “cannibalize[d] demand for authorized live recordings, session work, bespoke ‘fan song’ commissions, and other ancillary monetization,” per the complaints.

“Bundled or low-cost AI outputs reset buyer expectations, driving down sync quotes, library rates, and work-for-hire budgets; buyers substitute cheaper AI rather than licensing Plaintiffs’ recordings/compositions,” another section states.

Finally, both suits feature state-level claims pertaining to Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (the defendants allegedly utilized “biometric identifiers and voiceprints derived from human performances without adhering to the legal safeguards required”) and Right of Publicity Act (concerning the alleged misuse of “artists’ voices and identities for commercial gain without permission”).

And each proposes certifying a variety of classes. One of the latter would include “independent artists in the United States who own or exclusively control registered copyrights in sound recordings fixed on or after February 15, 1972, that appear in any dataset Udio” or Suno “copied, ingested, or exploited for AI training.”

Article Originally Posted on www.digitalmusicnews.com