Munich court rules against Suno in GEMA's AI copyright case
A German court just ruled that where an AI model trains does not put it outside the reach of copyright law.
A German court just ruled that where an AI model trains does not put it outside the reach of copyright law.
On July 31, the Munich Regional Court ruled against Suno in a case brought by GEMA, Germany's music rights society, over six compositions. The court found that training the model in the United States, storing the works inside it, offering the model, and generating outputs from it were each acts of infringement — applying US copyright law to the training step and rejecting Suno's fair-use defence. Suno must disclose the scale of its use and has been held liable for damages. The judgment is not final; an appeal is expected.
It is the first major European ruling to treat "we trained somewhere else" as no defence at all. AI music platforms built on open generation from unlicensed catalogues now have a court record showing that argument does not survive contact with a European rights society. The commercial path that survives is the one Udio has already taken with Warner and Universal: license first, generate second.
