Newsletter: Korein Tillery Files Lawsuit on Behalf of Music Artists Against AI Music-Generation Platform Suno

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Korein Tillery has filed a new lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The lawsuit is filed on behalf of acclaimed musician Jason Isbell and other music artists representing a proposed class of similarly situated musicians whose identities have been appropriated and commercially exploited without consent by AI music-generation platform Suno, Inc. The lawsuit asserts claims under a number of state right-of-publicity laws and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

The case, Jason Isbell, et al. v. Suno, Inc., alleges that Suno designed, trained, and commercially deployed a platform built to retrieve musicians by name and provide a multi-media experience evoking those musicians' identities on command. The complaint includes dozens of demonstrations and exhibits of Suno providing—based on musicians' names alone—songs like one the named musician might make, descriptions of the musicians' attributes, and related images (e.g. a white glove for the artist Michael Jackson). According to the complaint, Suno provides these outputs for musicians whose talents span blues, rock, country, alternative, reggaeton, rap, pop, salsa, Hawaiian, ska punk, and alt-country-punk fusion. 

The lawsuit also alleges that Suno, without consent, created and stored voiceprints indexed by name when training its AI on musicians' voices.

"Despite its assertions that Suno did not train its AI on specific musicians' identities and does not allow artists' names as prompts, its own public-facing product shows otherwise," said George A. Zelcs, Partner at Korein Tillery. "Further, Suno's own licensing agreements with major music companies expressly recognize that a copyright license does not supply the separate consent required from the human creators whose identities have been commercially exploited. It's time for musicians to have a seat at the table. We will work vigorously to protect their right to control the use of their own identities." 

The Korein Tillery legal team on this matter includes George A. Zelcs, Audrey L. C. Austin, Marc Wallenstein, and Lucy Prather.

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