The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”
The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
The best part about this is that UMG WMG and SMG all simultaneously went “you can’t take an artist’s life work and exploit it, that’s unfair, it’s OUR job to take an artist’s life’s work and exploit it”
I mean yes to the sentiment but it would be quite a bit different if these artists signed a distribution contract with the AI company saying they got a miniscule percentage of royalties for every track somebody generated or even licensed this music to train on whatsoever.
This is true in the art industry as well. Many outsourced artists from third world countries are exploited with unreasonable wages and long hours