The John Joseph Moakley Courthouse. Photo Credit: 4300streetcar
Amid an ugly UMG v. Suno discovery showdown, questions about the majors’ anti-dilution arrangements with DSPs – and whether they even have the right to license their catalogs for AI training – are taking center stage. Meanwhile, Universal Music and Sony Music are set to shed light on the precise scope of their signed-and-sealed agreements with AI developers.
The litigants discussed these and other pressing subjects during a roughly 80-minute discovery conference today. As the majors’ initial Suno copyright complaint is now 29 months old, and as the non-party subpoenas are flying, the courtroom confrontation’s complexity isn’t a secret.
Put differently, we’ll have to save several interesting details for later in order to keep things moving along here. As many know from our in-depth coverage, quite a lot is riding on the central “fair use” question, and particularly whether AI audio is diluting the market for and value of proper music.
Running with the fact, UMG EVP of digital business development and strategy Jonathan Dworkin is poised to supplement his prior deposition in writing – with a particular focus on any AI-detection and -tracking disclosures provided by Spotify.
More interestingly, Suno’s counsel explored the heretofore little-discussed idea that the majors may not “have the rights to license these works for AI training.”
“As you can expect, license agreements with artists – some of which, in Sony’s case, go back to the 1980s – don’t anticipate AI,” Latham & Watkins’ Britt Lovejoy summed up. “They don’t say whether or not Sony or UMG could use the works for AI training. So there’s a little bit of contract interpretation that’s going on over at these companies to determine whether or not they have the rights to include those works in the AI training dataset.”
(On the opposite side of the legal battle, counsel for the non-Warner majors rather unsurprisingly pushed back by maintaining that there’s “no determination that has been affirmatively made that our clients lack or do not possess AI training rights in the recordings that are included in their catalog(s).”)
Factoring also for adjacent questions about artist opt-ins, you’re left with uncertainty as to whether a viable AI training market actually exists, Team Suno communicated in many more words. And to reiterate the obvious, the defendant platform couldn’t have harmed a non-existent market.
Long story short, at the intersection of both points, Universal Music and Sony Music, past disclosure of their actual AI licensing agreements aside, are officially expected to divulge which of the works at issue have been licensed to different AI platforms.
Additionally, Suno is said to be preparing to turn over copies of its agreements with Believe and BMG but not documents concerning the negotiations thereof.
Similarly, the litigants have reached “at least conceptual theoretical resolution” of discovery disputes involving various performance and financial data, with a related joint report due in one week.
Finally, the concessions the litigating majors made to obtain AI-geared anti-dilution provisions in their DSP licensing agreements also surfaced during the proceeding. Discussions are ongoing, and as highlighted today, further depositions of DSP execs themselves could be in the cards.