A Munich court ruled that AI music generator Suno violated copyrights through both its training process and its outputs. The court also applied US law and rejected Suno's fair use defense.
GEMA, Germany's music rights organization, had sued for injunction, disclosure, and damages and prevailed on most counts. The case centered on six well-known songs, including "Atemlos durch die Nacht" by Kristina Bach and "Rasputin" by Frank Farian, Fred Jay, and George Reyam. Only the musical compositions were at issue, not the lyrics.
Court says memorization is real
The court determined that all six tracks are reproducibly contained in Suno's version 3.5 and 4 models. In AI research, this phenomenon is known as memorization: during training, a model may not just learn general patterns but also store specific content from its training data, which can later be pulled back out as outputs.
Suno argued that its model doesn't store songs, only "mathematically learned patterns and generalized features." Any similarities in the outputs, the company claimed, were the result of user prompts and statistical correlations.
