A Michigan-based music publishing company tied to Grammy Award-winning rapper Eminem is suing the artificial intelligence platform Suno, alleging it reproduced copyrighted works without authorization.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, said Suno took 269 musical compositions by Eminem that the publishing company, Eight Mile Style, owns or controls and has the exclusive right to license, and trained its AI model so that its users can “create sound recordings based upon prompts.”
Suno’s AI music generator, according to its website, allows users to “make an original song with vocals and lyrics” by describing the song in words and clicking a button to generate it.
According to the court document, the company made “illicit copies of millions of copyrighted musical works, including Eight Mile Style’s” and created a platform where people can pay money to create songs based on the “illicit copies.”
The lawsuit, citing the digital media company 404 Media, also alleges that Suno used a service to scrape “millions of songs and lyrics” from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius.
The court document provided an example where Suno generated the track “Lose Yourself by Eminem” for a user, which copies, verbatim, the lyrics of the Detroit-based rapper’s hit song.
Suno, which has an office in San Francisco, is accused in the lawsuit of committing direct copyright infringement, circumvention of protection measures and removal or alteration of copyright management information.
Eight Mile Style is asking the federal court to find that Suno willfully infringed its copyrights and order the “impoundment or destruction” of all unauthorized copies of the publisher’s works that the company has, the court document said. The publisher is also seeking damages that could exceed $40 million.
In response to the lawsuit, Suno said in a written statement to CBS News, “Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist’s work. To protect against this, we do not allow prompts for specific artists’ names and songs and work with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential misuse. We are always working to strengthen our guardrails and we will continue to add new safeguards that protect artists and our users.”