Photo Credit: Amir Shtanger
The third-party subpoena disputes aren’t finished in UMG v. Suno: Now, Nvidia is firing back against the non-Warner majors’ demand for information about its investment in the AI music platform, said platform’s possible impact on the industry, and more.
Nvidia’s NVentures venture arm took aim at the deposition subpoena in a firmly worded motion to quash yesterday. At this stage of the game – and thanks in large part to DMN’s exclusive coverage – that the subpoenas are flying in the ugly legal battle isn’t a secret.
Just in passing, Suno is demanding stream-volume data from the Mechanical Licensing Collective and licensing-talk details from DSPs including Apple. Universal Music and Sony Music, for their part, are zeroing in on Suno’s market impact (and specifically investors’ assessments thereof) in multiple subpoenas of their own.
Throw in a disagreement-heavy discovery process – plus a follow-up complaint filed after Suno’s v6 rollout – and you’re left with a courtroom confrontation that’s showing few signs of resolving.
Enter Nvidia’s motion to quash the non-Warner majors’ deposition subpoena, which the Suno Series C backer is criticizing as an “undue burden” and irrelevant in that the information can perhaps be obtained from different sources.
As with the dispute’s other Suno investor subpoenas – involving the likes of Menlo and Lightspeed – the appropriate parties have apparently been discussing the subject for some months.
But the short version is that the current subpoena, which surfaced in August and was subsequently amended following a bit of back and forth, pertains to Nvidia’s “pre-investment business relationship with Suno” and its execs; docs provided by Suno concerning the investment; training-data due diligence and infringement-litigation risks; and Suno’s potential impact on the market for sound recordings, to name some.
The way Universal Music-partnered Nvidia sees the situation, its pile of already-produced documents is more than sufficient: “After months of negotiations, collection, and review, NVentures produced 6,324 documents comprising 28,194 pages,” per the motion to quash.
Furthermore, “(c)ompelling production of such information (meaning opinions and private conclusions) from investors threatens to supplant the role of testifying experts in the litigation,” according to Nvidia.
“This is especially true where the target of the subpoena is a passive investor without a board seat whose role was simply deciding whether to invest,” the company continued.
“The deposition of such an investor is particularly inappropriate where the investor has already made a substantial production, and the plaintiff has not shown why the investor’s existing production was insufficient or why additional information could not be obtained from the defendant or public sources.”
Meanwhile, Universal Music and Sony Music have allegedly “made no effort at all to explain what information they cannot obtain from the voluminous production NVentures already made, or from Suno,” Nvidia vented.
With that, we’ve yet another subpoena showdown to track in UMG v. Suno, which isn’t exactly unfolding at a breakneck pace. Moreover, Warner Music, Believe, and BMG licensing pacts aside, Suno is also grappling with lawsuits filed by the likes of Elvis Presley Enterprises and Eminem publisher Eight Mile Style.