Munich Court Finds Suno Liable for Copyright Infringement in AI Training

A Munich court has ruled that AI music generator Suno violated copyright law in training its models. The lawsuit was filed by GEMA, the German organization representing authors and publishers. Six well-known works were at the center of the case; the court found that Suno's v3.5 and v4 models reproduce recognizable elements of the original tracks.

The pivotal episode: the company used stream-ripping — extracting audio from a streaming service (YouTube) by circumventing its technical protection measures. The court classified this as piracy, regardless of how the data was subsequently used. Liability was placed on the company, not its users: it was Suno that made the decisions about training data composition and model architecture.

1The Court Rejected Both Lines of Defense

Suno invoked two legal arguments — Germany's Text and Data Mining exemption and the US fair use doctrine. The court rejected both: the TDM exemption does not cover the commercial reproduction of protected works, and fair use has no standing in German law. The ruling sets a precedent for other European jurisdictions.

For the AI music market, this is a turning point: without licensing agreements with rights holders, or a shift to verified open data, companies risk following Suno into court. The exposure isn't limited to music generators — similar questions face any service that collected data without the explicit consent of its creators.