A federal judge refused Thursday to dismiss most of a proposed class action against Suno brought by country artist Tony Justice, clearing the case's core claims — that Suno's outputs infringe copyrights as unauthorized derivative works, and that the company circumvented YouTube's encryption to obtain training data — for discovery. [1] Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, ruling in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, denied Suno's motion to dismiss on two of the three counts it had challenged; only a Tennessee Consumer Protection Act claim fell, after the plaintiffs conceded they had cited the wrong statute. [1]

Justice, a full-time truck driver whose song "Last of the Cowboys" has been streamed more than 8 million times, filed the case in June 2025 alongside a companion suit against Udio in New York, arguing independent artists had been shut out of the litigation the major labels brought against Suno and Udio a year earlier. [1] Universal and Sony's own suit against Suno — filed the same week the three majors took equity stakes in a rival AI music company — proceeds separately before the same judge, and Saylor's ruling in that case two days earlier is doing direct work in Justice's: he cited his own August 18 finding that the majors had plausibly alleged Suno used stream-ripping tools to bypass YouTube's protections, and applied the identical reasoning to Justice's parallel claim. "Determining whether Suno actually circumvented such a measure will require a developed factual record," Saylor wrote, "and those issues must be resolved at a later day." [1]

On the derivative-works claim, Suno had argued Justice's complaint failed because it did not identify a single Suno output that actually reproduces his own songs — pointing instead to roughly 100 examples involving other artists' work. Saylor rejected that argument. "There is no categorical requirement that a plaintiff must produce the derivative work at the motion to dismiss stage," he wrote, adding that the complaint's citation of remarks by Suno's own chief executive "that Suno's model already has the ability to produce outputs that replicate real artists' vocals and songs" was enough to support "a plausible inference that Suno's model has likewise created outputs that are substantially similar to plaintiffs' works." [1] Suno had also argued Justice could simply use its own publicly available tool to search for infringing outputs himself; Saylor dismissed that in a footnote, writing that whether plaintiffs can now generate infringing outputs "is a separate issue from whether the AI tool has ever been used by Suno to generate infringing outputs" in the past. [1]

The ruling leaves Justice — an artist with no label, no litigation budget comparable to Universal or Sony's, and no equity stake in any AI company positioning itself as the licensed alternative — pursuing the identical legal theory the majors are pursuing with vastly more resources. Both cases now head toward the same eventual question, which Saylor has flagged as likely dispositive in the majors' case as well: whether training an AI model on copyrighted recordings without a license constitutes fair use. Fact discovery in the majors' case closes September 30; Justice's case, cleared for discovery just this week, is earlier in that same pipeline behind it. [1]

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles