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German court rules that AI music firm Suno violated copyrights
Germany's state-mandated licensing agency, GEMA, says the verdict has "global significance," as Suno is also directed to pay yet-to-be-quantified damages.
https://p.dw.com/p/5Huxn Advertisement The Munich Regional Court ruled on Friday that Suno AI, a US-based company, which generates songs from text prompts. has violated copyrights and has to disclose illicit revenues.
The lawsuit initiated in January 2025 by GEMA, Germany's state-mandated licensing agency, argued that Suno trained its AI models on copyrighted music without obtaining licences or compensating its rights holders.
According to the verdict, Suno will have to pay damages that have yet to be quantified. Suno has disagreed with the ruling and said it would evaluate all available options, including an appeal.
"This is a verdict of global significance," Gema CEO Tobias Holzmueller told Reuters .
The lawsuit has been closely watched, as it is one of the first major cases anywhere in the world to test how traditional copyright law applies to AI music training and AI-generated music outputs. Among Suno's arguments was the fact that the German court does not have proper jurisdiction to rule on AI model training activities that occurred exclusively inside the United States.
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The proceedings could help determine whether AI music companies must obtain licenses before training their models on copyrighted songs, and whether AI-generated music that closely resembles existing songs constitutes copyright infringement.
"Our goal is not to clear Suno from the face of the earth, but obviously to get into licensing negotiations on an eye-to-eye level, which was not possible with Suno so far," explains GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller, who describes the company as "by far the largest and commercially most successful of all AI music models." He believes Suno pursues a much more aggressive business strategy than its competitors.
The outcome of this case is also linked to another central question: How should creators be compensated when their music is used to train generative AI systems?
Last year, GEMA won a related case against OpenAI before the same court. It found that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI models on copyrighted song lyrics and reproduced them via ChatGPT without authorization.
OpenAI was ordered to cease and desist from reproducing the works in the model, to disclose information and pay damages. But as the company pursues an appeal, the ruling remains non-final.
In contrast to that decision, the current lawsuit does not focus on song lyrics, but on entire music pieces.
One of the aspects that makes this lawsuit important is that it has not been initiated by a private company or record label, but rather by a music collecting society, notes Martin Senftleben, professor of intellectual property law at the Amsterdam Law School.
Such initiatives "are particularly important because, by definition, you could say that they're more inclusive," Senftleben tells DW. "You can become a GEMA member even if you're not a very well-known high-profile artist or composer. And that means there's a chance of bringing remuneration for AI users to a much broader group of rights holders."
GEMA represents more than 95,000 composers, songwriters and music publishers in Germany, along with over 2 million rights holders worldwide.
GEMA claims that Suno trained its AI on copyrighted music without permission or payment to songwriters, composers and publishers represented by the German music collecting society. GEMA also says that the US-based company is commercially benefiting from those works without compensating the artists.
Suno's music creation platform generates songs through simple text prompts. Users can describe the mood, style or genre they desire and the system synthesizes a structured track — complete with lyrics, vocals and instrumentation — in under a minute.
The songs that are produced by the AI system can be very similar to copyrighted songs.
During the court proceedings, GEMA demonstrated this by prompting Suno AI to create tracks with the original lyrics of different popular songs in its repertoire, including "Forever Young" by Alphaville, "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega, "Daddy Cool" by Boney M., "Cheri Cheri Lady" by Modern Talking and "Atemlos durch die Nacht," written by Kristina Bach and popularized by Helene Fischer .
Along with the lyrics, the plaintiffs prompted the desired musical style and the title of the work, without specifying any melody, rhythm, harmony or arrangement.
Yet the resulting AI songs are very similar to the original works.
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Suno admits that the original songs at the center of GEMA's lawsuit are among the numerous pieces that were used to train the AI model.
AI companies such as Suno claim that the ingestion of data for AI training can be done freely on the basis of what is known as "fair use" in the US and the "text and data mining exception" rule in the EU.
But whether such licence-free AI training is allowed under copyright law remains heavily contested globally. In different lawsuits around the world, courts are now examining whether such uses harm the economic market of the original creators through unfair competition.
"The novelty in the lawsuit is that GEMA does not focus on the AI training stage," explains Senftleben. By basing their claim on tests that demonstrate that these AI systems generate songs that have similarities with copyright-protected works from their repertoire, "they bridge this gap between relevant use now taking place in AI training, and the market harm done at AI output level," he adds.
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