A live performance from Giovanny Ayala, whose recordings and compositions were allegedly used to train Suno models without authorization. Photo Credit: Petruss
Another day, another high-stakes copyright lawsuit against Suno – this time from Latin label and publisher Gerencia 360, which is accusing the AI music platform of infringing on hundreds of compositions and recordings.
Founded by Luis del Villar 13 years back, Burbank-headquartered Gerencia submitted its straightforward complaint to a California federal court yesterday. Besides Suno, the action names as a defendant Israel-based Bright Data, which says it provides clients with “ready-to-ingest petabyte-scale datasets.”
If Bright Data rings a bell, that’s probably because it and Suno are also grappling with a different-but-similar suit levied by Round Hill Music. Moreover, Round Hill and Gerencia alike are repped by Adams & Reese as well as Skaggs Faucette.
Consequently, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s considerable overlap between the actions, each seeking a mountain of damages for allegedly unauthorized training, allegedly infringing outputs, and alleged DMCA violations.
“Suno obtained copies of Gerencia’s copyrighted works by accessing these platforms – including specifically YouTube and Deezer – through automated scraping tools that bypassed login requirements, subscription gates, and technical anti-bot defenses, in part through tools and proxy services supplied by” Bright Data, the newer suit reads in part.
“Suno then ingested these unauthorized copies into its training pipeline, producing an AI model capable of generating audio,” the text sums up.
Interestingly, Gerencia’s complaint also explores the little-discussed idea that Suno’s “easy to circumvent” guardrails fail to prevent users from generating audio for translated versions of protected lyrics.
“For example, one of the Gerencia Works is entitled ‘15 Besos’ as performed by Cornelio Vega y Su Dinastia,” a relevant section states. “While Suno would not create a ‘Norteño’ song where the Spanish lyrics for ‘15 Besos’ were supplied, Suno did create a song in the Norteño style with the lyrics directly translated into English, generating the name ‘Quince Besos’. ‘Quince’ is Spanish for fifteen.”
All told, Gerencia, which serves as the professional home of artists including Jonatan Sánchez, is seeking $66.6 million in direct infringement statutory damages from Suno; the same amount from Bright Data for its alleged contributory infringement; and about $33 million total from both defendants for alleged CMI and anti-circumvention DMCA violations.
That cumulative sum is, of course, significant. But more pressingly for Suno (as well as Anthropic and others), after years of litigation trial and error, carefully conceived suits, touching on all the important bases while simultaneously refuting AI giants’ fair use defense, are becoming increasingly common.
As several of these giants have acknowledged training on huge piles of IP without authorization, and as one can now access a related database, when will the suits end? Put differently, what’s to stop a steady stream of additional complaints, demanding billions in damages, from materializing?
Seemingly nothing, and it’ll be worth continuing to track all these industry actions, plus claims spearheaded by individuals and entities outside the music world, moving forward.
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