Jason Isbell has filed a class action lawsuit against Suno, with the country rocker accusing the prominent AI music generation platform of letting users rip off artists’ musical likeness without permission.
In the suit, filed in federal court on Monday, Isbell and fellow musician plaintiffs David Lowery, Guy Forsyth and Eduardo Calle liken Suno to The Borg out of Star Trek, quoting the villainous cybernetic collective’s famed “resistance is futile” catchphrase and referencing a scene in which The Borg remakes Captain Kirk into a machine.
“Suno built and trained a model to index musicians by name,” the complaint said. “It encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit. Typing in a musician’s name creates a musician-based channel with a song, description, and graphic invoking the musician’s identity. Suno knows the commercial value of a machine that can conjure up a beloved musician’s identity simply by invoking their name. The company thus encourages its paid marketing partners to advertise this capability, without the consent of the musicians it invokes, while doing only enough to give Suno plausible deniability.”
Isbell’s suit is just the latest against Suno, as the company also faces legal action from the likes of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Round Hill Music on allegations of mass copyright infringement. (Warner Music Group, the smallest of the big three record labels, also previously sued Suno, though the company settled and entered into a partnership with Suno late last year.)
This latest suit differs than the previously filed claims though, focusing on likeness rather than on the copyrights themselves.
“Many musicians sell their rights to specific recordings,” the suit said. “However, the identity right belongs to the performer regardless of who owns any copyright in an underlying recording unless the identity right is separately licensed, typically for merchandise under the artist’s control. This lawsuit seeks to recover the value of those misappropriated identities and to stop their ongoing commercial exploitation.”
A spokesperson for Suno rebuked the claims in the new suit, saying in a statement that “we believe these claims are without merit and we intend to defend against them.”
“Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name,” the spokesperson said. “We stand by the many protections we have put into place across the platform, including blocking prompts for specific artists’ names or copyrighted songs. We also work with third party technology providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential unauthorized use of artists’ work.”