Photo Credit: Wesley Tingey
On top of aggressively pushing to learn DistroKid’s AI release volume, Universal Music and Sony Music are now demanding that Suno investor Lightspeed testify and provide a trove of documents concerning the platform’s training and more.
That subpoena sub-dispute quietly boiled over one month ago, when Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has backed Suno during its Series B, C, and D raises alike, filed a motion to quash. And the litigating majors just recently opposed the request across nearly 30 pages.
Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the underlying copyright infringement battle, Universal Music and Sony Music are seeking no shortage of information from Lightspeed – including documents and communications pertaining to the business risks associated with Suno’s training data, the AI music platform’s “efforts or failure to license” the same data, and more.
Meanwhile, on the deposition front, the non-Warner majors identified 20 topics of testimony, among them training-data legal risks, due diligence, Lightspeed’s professional relationships with Suno execs, and the VC’s “understanding of SUNO’s impact or effect on the music industry.”
(Many will recall the plaintiffs’ attempt to pinpoint Suno’s “training number” and to obtain a copy of its Warner Music licensing deal; at a minimum, the sought docs would presumably touch on the latter and the adjacent policy overhaul.)
In the opposite corner, the “untimely” and “unduly burdensome” asks aren’t sitting right with Lightspeed, which in the motion to quash reiterated that it’d previously provided 152 documents totaling “1,259 pages…across six agreed-upon categories.”
As such, the non-party (repped here, like the AI-upstart defendant, by Latham & Watkins) downplayed the testimony subjects as “either already addressed by Lightspeed’s document production or” better suited for Suno itself.
Unfortunately for us, the public version of Universal Music’s and Sony Music’s retort contains redactions. (Some of the redactions hit the elements of Lightspeed’s investment thesis that purportedly demonstrate “the market harm that contradicts Suno’s fair use defense.”)
But the gist of the filing is clear enough: Lightspeed’s invested in Suno multiple times over the course of the courtroom confrontation and should therefore produce all the relevant documents that materialized following the initial discovery window’s June 2025 cutoff.
Furthermore, the legal text also recaps a magistrate judge’s prior approval of a subpoena involving Udio investor a16z. Bearing all this in mind, it’ll be worth continuing to track the Universal Music-Lightspeed documents showdown.
But in the bigger picture, that the majors are now litigating against those associated with AI giants – the initially mentioned DistroKid actions certainly stand out – is significant.
Moreover, it remains to be seen how the moves will affect different cases against the company; that revelations in one dispute could reach separate-but-similar suits isn’t a secret.
Several of said suits are likewise plodding through discovery. In the complaint submitted against Suno by artists including Tony Justice, for instance, both sides last week filed to delay a scheduling conference from late October until early December.
In their motion, the litigants cited “the anticipated complexity of this case” as well as a desire “to discuss proposals for streamlining and coordinating discovery in light of other pending cases against Suno, which should lead to more efficient and streamlined adjudication of these proceedings in the long term.”
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