Jonathan Coote of Bray & Krais on AI and fair use
As the Suno and Udio lawsuits make their way through the courts, the fundamental issue in the cases is likely to be whether the 'fair use' defence can be successfully run for the training of AI tools
As reported at the beginning of August, Suno and Udio have now filed their defences in the ongoing lawsuits brought by the Recording Industry Association Of America on behalf of the major labels. As predicted, with Suno admitting that it has trained on copyrighted recordings, the cases are set to be primarily about whether the ‘fair use’ defence in the US for infringement can be successfully run for the training of AI tools on copyright works.
Whilst there is not actually much information disclosed about how the companies trained their models in the submissions, Suno notes that its training data “includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions”. This shifts the burden from the RIAA to prove its works were in the original dataset and could potentially open the way for more lawsuits - for example, from publishers - whose underlying works would inevitably be found in those files. Notably, Udio doesn't make the same statement…