SOCAN, Canada’s non-profit music rights organization, is suing AI music generation platform Suno, accusing it of infringing on the rights of more than 150 Canadian artists without their consent or providing proper compensation.
SOCAN says the lawsuit is necessary “to ensure that human music creation is valued, respected, and compensated.”
“SOCAN has a responsibility to act when the rights of music creators and publishers are put at risk. The evidence shows that the Suno platform has generated and streamed outputs that copy works in our repertoire, and that cannot go unchallenged,” SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown said in a press release on Wednesday. “Innovation can’t come at the expense of human creativity. The future of music must belong to the people who make it.”
The release also said that the legal action is a “necessary and proactive step to ensure that human music creation is valued, respected, and compensated.” The organization added that it expects more violations to come to light as litigation moves forward.
Alongside the lawsuit, which was filed in Canadian federal court on Wednesday, SOCAN has launched a website comparing Suno outputs to songs by Canadian artists like Tom Cochrane and Avril Lavigne. The Suno clips play nearly note-for-note and word-for-word replicas of popular songs like “Life is a Highway.” The lawsuit’s claims have yet to be proven in court. BetaKit has reached out to Suno for comment.
SOCAN’s website notes that it supports AI innovation when it is lawful and transparent, and is not used to replace human creativity. The organization is asking for Suno to comply with copyright law and stop making available songs that infringe on that law.
SOCAN wants Suno to pay damages, and is asking for a portion of the profits Suno made from the songs SOCAN says were copied from its artists, or statutory damages of up to $20,000 for each song. It’s also asking for punitive damages to deter Suno and other AI companies from misappropriating copyright-protected works in the future.
The lawsuit notes that Suno, which is headquartered in Massachusetts, is valued at $5.4 billion USD ($7.5 billion CAD), has more than two million paid users, and generates seven million songs per day. The company, which was founded in 2022, is the leading music platform of its kind.
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Suno is also facing legal action from multiple US labels and other music rights groups abroad. Last week, it lost a case to SOCAN’s German equivalent, GEMA. Suno was found to have violated German copyright law; the company is reportedly looking to find a pathway to overturn the decision. Another ongoing lawsuit, filed by a group of US musicians, compares Suno to the Star Trek villains the Borg, framing Suno as an identity-subsuming monolith. Suno has previously argued that it was allowed to use copyrighted works to train its models under fair use.
SOCAN, which collects licence fees and matches and distributes them to rights holders, has been working to address the rise of AI-generated works in the industry. In June, SOCAN collaborated with Musical AI, which is a Canadian tech company that offers rights management tools, to support efforts to attribute AI music output for the purpose of compensating musicians and publishers. Earlier this year, it launched a national campaign arguing that copyright exceptions should not be granted to allow creative works to be used for AI training.
Feature image courtesy Pixaby.