Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment won court approval this week to add a new piracy claim to their copyright lawsuit against Suno, accusing the AI music company of circumventing YouTube's anti-downloading protections to build its training data. [1] Two days earlier, all three major labels — Universal, Sony and Warner — had joined a $76 million funding round for Stability AI, a rival generative-music company built on the same underlying technology the labels are suing Suno for allegedly stealing. [2]
The amended complaint, filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleges Suno used open-source tools called YT-DL and YT-DLP to bypass YouTube's "rolling cipher" encryption and scrape copyrighted recordings — a practice known as stream-ripping. [1] Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted the labels leave to bring the claim on August 18, ruling that "the complaint alleges a plausible claim for violation of Section 1201(a)(1)" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, while separately denying the labels' bid to add 61,026 additional recordings to the existing 560-work suit — a expansion that would have carried a theoretical maximum of more than $9 billion in statutory damages, against roughly $84 million under the current complaint. [1] Saylor wrote that adding tens of thousands of works "will have obvious consequences of complexity and delay," and said resolving Suno's fair-use defense "will likely resolve the predominant issue in this case." [1] The amended complaint seeks up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $2,500 per act of circumvention, against a company that raised more than $400 million in June at a $5.4 billion valuation. [1]
The Stability AI round tells a different story about the same underlying anxiety. Universal and Warner had already signed strategic partnerships with Stability AI in October and November 2025, respectively, agreeing to co-develop AI music tools; this week's $76 million Series B brought Sony in alongside them, along with Electronic Arts, AMD Ventures and existing investors including Sean Parker and Eric Schmidt. [2] Stability AI's pitch to the labels is explicit about what separates it from Suno in their eyes: the company says its models, including the newly launched Stable Audio 3.0, train on licensed data rather than scraped recordings. "While responsibly trained generative AI models are critical, they are not enough on their own," the company said in its funding announcement. "Artist-centric AI will only win if the product experience on a licensed platform is better than the experience on an unlicensed platform." [2]
That framing is precisely the labels' defense against the charge of inconsistency: they are not opposed to AI-generated music, only to AI-generated music trained without a license. But the distinction requires trusting that Stability AI's licensing claims are more thoroughly verified than Suno's training practices were before this year's lawsuits began — a trust the labels are extending with equity capital rather than merely a partnership agreement. Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont, who joined Stability AI's board as part of the round, put the pitch in almost identical terms to the company's own: "While others are building generalized AI, Stability AI is building creative tools and doing it alongside the artists, studios, and rights holders whose work defines the field." [2]
Two days later, Saylor cited his own stream-ripping ruling against the majors to keep an equivalent claim alive in a separate case — a proposed class action brought by independent country artist Tony Justice, a story this paper covers separately today. [1] That companion ruling, and the majors' own litigation, share the same legal theory. Only one of the two plaintiffs suing over it currently holds equity in a company betting the theory can be avoided with the right licensing structure.
The scale gap between the two cases is stark. The majors' complaint covers 560 works and seeks statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringed work, a maximum exposure Saylor's ruling this week deliberately kept from ballooning by rejecting the bid to add 61,026 additional recordings — an expansion that would have carried a theoretical maximum north of $9 billion. [1] Justice's companion suit, by contrast, was filed by a full-time truck driver and his small label alongside a handful of other independent artists, with none of the majors' litigation budget or, evidently, any of their appetite for building an equity position in an AI company positioned to make the underlying dispute moot for future artists. The majors are pursuing Suno through the courts while quietly building the alternative infrastructure — Stability AI's licensed-training model — that would let them exit the confrontation on favorable terms regardless of how the fair-use question is ultimately decided.
What the labels have not done, publicly, is extend that same alternative to independent artists like Justice. Universal, Sony and Warner's equity stakes in Stability AI come with the kind of institutional access — board seats, licensing negotiations, product input — that only companies with existing catalog relationships to the majors can leverage. An artist suing Suno alone, without a label deal, has no comparable seat at that table; his only recourse remains the courtroom the majors are simultaneously trying to route around.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles