An Artist-Led Lawsuit Against Suno Lawsuit Introduces Stream-Ripping Claims, Says the Music Generator’s ‘Dataset Is Soiled With Piracy and Misappropriation’

Another day, another amended copyright complaint against Suno, which is now grappling with “stream-ripping” allegations in a months-old indie-led action.

Those allegations surfaced in an amended suit from country artist Tony Justice, who initially sued Suno about three months ago. The “Last of the Cowboys” act’s proposed class action litigation, we reported over the summer, accuses the gen AI defendant of training on protected music without authorization, replicating protected works in certain outputs, and more.

And courtesy of the amended complaint, “more” officially includes allegedly bypassing YouTube anti-piracy measures to download “many – if not all” its training-data tracks. As we reported yesterday, the major labels recently introduced the same claim against Suno.

Consequently, both suits contain similar descriptions of the alleged circumvention and are painting the alleged stream ripping – separating and downloading audio from, among other sources, videos, that is – as a DMCA violation.

“This conduct confirms that Suno’s dataset is soiled with piracy and misappropriation, and that Suno’s commercial exploitation of its AI-generated outputs rests on systematic theft of the music,” Justice’s complaint reads in part.

The allegations are particularly noteworthy in light of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement for allegedly pirating books to train Claude – especially in that they allegedly foil AI developers’ longstanding “fair use” defenses.

While there are significant differences between the cases – Anthropic allegedly took advantage of straight pirate libraries as opposed to legitimate platforms, to name one – it’ll be worth tracking the music space’s Suno (and Udio) litigation from here.

Furthermore, the fresh legal text doesn’t solely focus on stream ripping, and Justice’s amended suit has swelled to a whopping 68 pages from 24 in the initial iteration.

Just scratching the surface, there’s now a much greater emphasis on Suno’s alleged soundalike outputs – a key component of alleged gen AI infringement, per the judge in authors’ Anthropic case.

Another important consideration: The massive size of the proposed class in Justice v. Suno. Should the court sign off on the current definition, said class would extend to any parties that own or control recordings or compositions allegedly used by Suno and “made available on internet-based streaming services since January 1, 2021.”

Of course, this definition leaves plenty of room for class members. Additionally, there’s a separate proposed class yet for those “whose works were accessed, copied, or ingested by Suno through circumvention of…technological protection measures” on DSPs.