Jason Isbell, David Lowery, Guy Forsyth, and Eduardo Calle filed a federal class action Monday accusing Suno of encoding musicians' identities so users can summon a named artist without consent. [1] The complaint quotes the Borg from Star Trek — "resistance is futile" — and describes a machine that remakes a person into a product. [1] That is a different theory from the majors' copyright suits this paper has tracked all week.
Saturday's account of how music's AI lawsuits multiply named the majors as the protagonists: Universal, Sony, and Warner suing Suno while buying equity in a rival, Round Hill refusing to settle, songwriters watching from outside the settlement math. Tuesday's amended stream-ripping claim was a pricing mechanism aimed at a licensing deal on the labels' terms. Wednesday's Stability AI round showed the same institutions investing in the technology they were suing elsewhere. Today's filing is the path that belongs to the performer after the recording is sold.
"Suno built and trained a model to index musicians by name," the complaint said. "It encoded musicians' identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians' names to Suno's considerable commercial benefit." [1] Typing a musician's name, the suit says, creates a musician-based channel with a song, description, and graphic invoking that identity. [1] Suno "encourages its paid marketing partners to advertise this capability, without the consent of the musicians it invokes, while doing only enough to give Suno plausible deniability." [1]
The Hollywood Reporter filed the story as the latest lawsuit against Suno, stacking it with Universal, Sony, and Round Hill, and noting that Warner Music Group settled last year and entered a partnership. [1] Those cases are about catalogs. This one is not. "Many musicians sell their rights to specific recordings," the suit said. "However, the identity right belongs to the performer regardless of who owns any copyright in an underlying recording unless the identity right is separately licensed, typically for merchandise under the artist's control." [1] The lawsuit "seeks to recover the value of those misappropriated identities and to stop their ongoing commercial exploitation." [1]
A Suno spokesperson called the claims without merit and said the company would defend them. [1] "Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone's name," the spokesperson said. [1] The company said it blocks prompts for specific artists' names or copyrighted songs and screens uploaded audio and lyrics through third-party providers. [1] A block on a name field is not a settlement with the person whose name it is. Warner already took the institutional off-ramp, a partnership after a suit. Universal and Sony are still on the copyright docket. Isbell's class is asking a court to treat a name as property that does not travel with the master. The majors can sue and invest. An individual artist, until Monday, had no comparable lever once the master was gone. The lever in this complaint is the face, not the tape.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles