A Munich court ruled Friday that Suno infringed copyright in a case involving six musical works, finding that the compositions were reproducibly contained in the company’s v3.5 and v4 models and recognizable in generated outputs.
The court largely granted GEMA’s requests for an injunction, disclosure and damages, with the amount to be determined later.
GEMA is the German collecting society representing more than 100,000 composers, lyricists and music publishers. Its lawyers demonstrated that Suno could generate substantially similar versions of “Rasputin,” “Daddy Cool,” “Mambo No. 5,” “Forever Young,” “Big in Japan” and “Atemlos durch die Nacht” without being given instructions about their melodies, harmonies, rhythms or arrangements.
The court concluded that the works had been memorized: training material could be contained within an AI model and extracted through its outputs. It also found that Suno had included the six works in its training dataset after extracting them from YouTube through stream-ripping techniques that circumvented the platform’s rolling cipher.
Suno faces several other high-profile lawsuits, but GEMA’s is the first case against the company to reach a judgment.
What makes this ruling dangerous for Suno isn’t just the underlying training question, it’s how easily the infringement was proven. GEMA’s legal team didn’t need to hack anything or reverse-engineer the model. They opened Suno’s ordinary prompt box — the same one every paying subscriber uses — typed in the original lyrics, a style description, and a song title, and got back a version of “Rasputin” close enough that the court ruled out coincidence given the complexity and length of the material. That’s the same result for “Daddy Cool,” “Mambo No. 5,” and six works in total.
The financial exposure is still unclear, and that’s arguably the scarier part for Suno. The court hasn’t set a damages figure — that comes after the disclosure phase, where Suno has to open its books on revenue tied to the infringing outputs.
Suno was valued at $5.4 billion in a June funding round. GEMA’s CEO called it “a verdict of global significance,” and the scale of the exposure — plus what disclosure reveals about how much of Suno’s revenue this touches — will shape how aggressively UMG and Sony pursue their own claims.
For two years, Suno’s entire pitch rested on one distinction: the model doesn’t copy, it creates. Feed it a prompt, and what comes back is new — inspired by the corpus, not lifted from it. That distinction is what let Suno tell courts, labels, and its own users that this was a creativity tool, not a laundering operation.
Friday’s ruling seriously weakened that claim. The court did not hold that every act of AI music training is inherently illegal. It held that these six works had not merely influenced the model in some abstract sense: protected elements were reproducibly contained in v3.5 and v4 and emerged in substantially similar outputs without the prompts specifying their melodies, harmonies, rhythms or arrangements.
That is the difference between “this sounds influenced by ‘Rasputin’” and “this reproduces protected elements of ‘Rasputin’ closely enough to infringe.”
There’s an implication here that has nothing to do with UMG, Sony, or appellate courts, and everything to do with the people actually using Suno to make music. The court found that six copyrighted compositions could be reproduced from two widely used Suno models — v3.5 and v4 — through the same kind of interface available to ordinary users.
That creates a serious product-trust problem rather than just a legal one. Six adjudicated songs don’t prove widespread memorization across every Suno model, but they do make blanket assurances of originality much harder to accept without more testing and transparency.
If protected elements were reproducibly contained in v3.5 and v4, users have reason to ask what safeguards Suno employs before presenting its outputs as original and commercially usable.
At minimum, that complicates what Suno creators think they have made: their prompts may sometimes be drawing from memorized compositions rather than shaping something genuinely new. The court placed legal responsibility for the six infringing outputs on Suno, but the uncertainty surrounding other outputs remains a problem its users deserve answers about.
The ruling is not a verdict against Suno in the UMG and Sony lawsuits, which are separate cases, in a different country, under different law, before different judges. Nothing about Friday’s decision binds a US court, and Munich’s reasoning on the American fair-use test carries no legal weight in Massachusetts — a German court doesn’t get to decide what 17 U.S.C. § 107 means, however pointedly it argued that “the copies are not covered by the fair use doctrine... as applicable in US law” and that the Warhol factors all cut against Suno.
But that said, it is a fully worked-out template for the exact factual argument UMG and Sony need to win their own cases, tested for months against real evidence. It hands their lawyers a domain-tested version of the memorization argument, plus a pointed distinction from the Anthropic and Meta book rulings that undercuts the precedent Suno was likely counting on.
That is persuasive material, not binding precedent, and the Massachusetts case will not test its influence immediately. Under the current schedule, dispositive motions are not due until April 9, 2027, making any US fair-use ruling a 2027 event at the earliest.
Friday’s ruling is not yet final, in the sense Suno can appeal to the Oberlandesgericht München. “We disagree with today’s ruling... and are evaluating all available options, including an appeal,” reads a statement from Suno. So it looks like it’s headed that way.
This is also the second consecutive Munich ruling against an AI company built on the same memorization framework, following November’s OpenAI decision on song lyrics. OpenAI’s appeal of that ruling is already sitting at the same appellate court, which means Oberlandesgericht München could end up reviewing both cases in separate appeals — and begin defining how durable the Munich court’s approach will be.
Garbage Garden – “emaN yM yaS” (Electronic / Dance)
J.vito – “You’re Not Alone” (Liquid Drum-and-Bass/Dubstep)
Kojo Osei – “Dear Father” (Afro-Soul)
SYRA_404 – “The Glass Handshake” (Electronic / Dance)
Zara Blue – “The Birthmark” (R&B / Soul)
Rizzards – “Necromancer” (Electronic / Dance)
Roy Thigpen – “Diving in” (R&B / Soul)
Blending hard-edged jungle beats with a chill yet dark and moody atmosphere, "Glass Handshake" delivers a driving rhythm that invites you to meet in the middle and sink into its noteworthy, atmospheric groove.
“I'm forty years in and I'm not worried about the tools. I'm worried about composers who mistake speed for skill, and who won't understand what they lost until the market corrects.”
— TV/Film music producer Hans York, via LinkedIn
MORE ZINSTREL: Written by Marcus Lawrence, courtesy of composition platform Versey.ai
Zinstrel.com | @zinstrel_ai on Instagram | AI Underground on Discord | r/Zinstrel
Copyright 2025-2026 Zinstrel, LLC - All rights reserved
Special thanks to our paid subscribers: C.Y. Lee, Daryl Dekking, Lynn Clapp, Steve Clapp, Mete Dibi, Daniel Lares, Dexter Garcia, Matthew Marturano, Sammy Stoltz, Tim Burley, Drew Thurlow, Sheila Spence, Lenny Skolnik, Màuhan Zonoozy, Matti Kuha, and Jacci Cenci-McGrody.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.