Dispute over AI music: GEMA demands license fees from Suno

The Society for Musical Performing Rights (GEMA) has filed a lawsuit against the AI audio generator Suno with the Munich Regional Court. The collecting society accuses the provider of having trained its generator with copyrighted musical works in an unauthorized manner.

With the lawsuit, GEMA wants to ensure that companies such as Suno pay license fees to the authors for the use of music. According to the collecting society, the songs concerned include “Forever Young” by the Münster-based 80s synth-pop band Alphaville, “Atemlos” by Kristina Bach, the Boney M. song “Daddy Cool” written by pop producer Frank Farian and works by the Modern Talking duo Dieter Bohlen and Thomas Anders. GEMA is certain that these and other titles are identifiably replicated in terms of melody, harmony, and rhythm.

“AI providers such as Suno Inc. use the works of our members without their consent and profit financially from this,” says Tobias Holzmüller, Managing Director of the collecting society. “At the same time, the output generated in this way competes with the works created by humans and deprives them of their economical basis.” Suno, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, currently charges its users 10 US dollars per month for the Pro version. In return, users receive credits that they can use to generate audio via prompt input.

GEMA wants to create legal clarity

GEMA is attempting to increase the pressure on providers of generative AI services with the current lawsuit. As the app is available everywhere in Germany, the jurisdiction is freely selectable; GEMA itself is based in Munich and had already filed a lawsuit against OpenAI there last year. In this case, however, the accusation was not that the ChatGPT developer was using the music itself illegally, but that the copyrights for the texts were being infringed, as no licenses had been acquired for them. The collecting society, which has 95,000 members, wants to use the proceedings to enforce licensing by AI companies.

However, GEMA does not appear to be entirely certain that the legal action will be successful: “If we don't want to do without man-made music in the future, we urgently need a legal framework that guarantees authors an appropriate share of the value created by AI providers,” says Ralf Weigand, Chairman of the Supervisory Board. The background to this uncertainty is the question of the extent to which an exception written into European law and the German Copyright Act in 2019 for the training of AI using text and data mining also applies to such cases. This affects all types of copyright-protected works. The collecting societies are currently still looking for answers. In the USA, too, the discussion whether and to what extent AI may also be trained with legally protected material is currently in full swing.

(mack)