Massachusetts judge lets Suno copyright claims proceed without specific output examples

A Massachusetts federal judge has allowed most of a copyright suit against Suno, the AI music company, to move forward. In an Aug. 20 decision, the court said the plaintiffs did not have to identify a specific Suno output that matched their songs at the pleading stage. According to the court’s decision, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV said the plaintiffs could survive dismissal on their derivative-works claim even without naming a particular infringing output. He held that there is no categorical rule requiring a plaintiff to produce the derivative work before discovery has begun. The plaintiffs are independent recording artists, or entities owned by independent recording artists, who hold copyrights in song compositions and recordings. They say Suno downloaded their songs from YouTube, copied them to train its model and then generated music that was the same as, or substantially similar to, protected expressive elements of their works. The amended complaint also says Suno intentionally structured its system to generate music designed to mirror the songs it trains on. It points to about 100 examples of outputs that allegedly replicated or closely resembled songs owned by other copyright holders. The judge rejected Suno’s argument that the copyright claim failed because the plaintiffs had not identified an infringing output from their own songs. He said the complaint contained enough non-conclusory facts to make infringement plausible, including allegations about Suno’s model design and comments by its chief executive. The court said it was plausible to infer that the model had created outputs substantially similar to the plaintiffs’ works. Whether the plaintiffs can prove that after full discovery is a question for later proceedings. The DMCA claim also survived. The complaint alleges that Suno used a stream-ripping tool to bypass YouTube’s rolling cipher and download songs for training, and the court said those allegations plausibly stated a circumvention claim under 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1). The decision cited the court’s earlier ruling in UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Suno, Inc. The Tennessee Consumer Protection Act count did not fare as well. Plaintiffs told the court the statutory citation had been inadvertent and that they meant to plead a Tennessee common-law unfair-competition claim, but Judge Saylor said an opposition brief is not a proper way to amend a complaint. He also said the amended pleading expressly invoked the TCPA, and that plaintiffs had not addressed Suno’s preemption and Rule 9(b) arguments. The result leaves Suno facing the copyright and DMCA claims, while the Tennessee consumer claim has been dismissed.