Major Labels Fire Off Amended Suno Complaint — New ‘Stream-Ripping’ Claims Take Center Stage

The major record labels have submitted an amended infringement complaint against Suno, which is now accused of “stream ripping” protected music from YouTube.

DMN previously noted that an amended action was incoming, and the RIAA-corralled plaintiffs recently made the updated filing official. Many are already familiar with the 15-month-old suit, which isn’t the only copyright complaint Suno’s facing.

But just to recap, the label plaintiffs say Suno trained its generative models on their recordings without authorization and “repeatedly generated outputs that closely matched the targeted copyrighted sound recording[s].”

And those alleged training methods and soundalike outputs, the majors maintain, definitely don’t fall under the fair use banner. Of course, Suno and different gen AI companies are adamant that training on copyrighted media is transformative and does, in fact, constitute fair use.

As things stand, litigation hasn’t provided a clear-cut answer to the high-stakes fair use question. But it has resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement for authors whose books were allegedly pirated by Anthropic for training purposes.

Importantly, the same case also saw the court rule in Anthropic’s favor concerning the training process itself. Ingesting non-pirated “copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” the judge ruled in late June.

In other words, for now, the means through which AI giants obtained protected works – not necessarily the ways that these works were ultimately used – are taking center stage in legal battles.

Enter the initially mentioned amended complaint, which doubles down on the plaintiffs’ existing arguments, trades the singular “model” for the plural when describing Suno’s AI systems, and, most significantly, leans into the new stream-ripping claims.

“Suno acquired many (if not all) of the copyrighted sound recordings in its training data by illicitly downloading them from YouTube using a notorious method of music piracy known as ‘stream ripping,’” one new paragraph spells out.

This purported discovery dates back to early September and stems from ICMP-provided evidence – referring to “private datasets that demonstrate the illegal scraping of copyrighted sound recordings from YouTube by Suno,” per the legal text.

Featuring language that some will recognize, the amended suit specifically accuses the WavTool owner of bypassing YouTube’s “rolling cipher.”

The alleged unauthorized copying of the plaintiffs’ recordings “was accomplished by Suno’s unlawful circumvention of YouTube’s rolling cipher and any other technological measures YouTube may have implemented to prevent the downloading and copying of licensed content,” the complaint reads.

“Suno’s actions constitute a breach of the Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions,” the updated filing drives home. Not stopping there, the document frames this alleged breach as evidence of wrongdoing regardless of other fair use considerations.

“And, in any event, fair use is not a defense for breach of the Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions,” per the suit.

All told, the majors are seeking either “an amount up to $2,500 with respect to each act of circumvention” or actual damages. DMN reached out to Suno for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response.