Sony Music Entertainment has once again filed a lawsuit against the AI music startup Udio, having been once of several companies (including Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group) to sue Udio in 2024.
However, both Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have now settled their cases against Udio and have entered into licensing agreements with the company.
Sony’s fresh lawsuit alleges that Udio infringed on more than 30,000 recordings, which it extracted from YouTube without Sony’s permission — all in the pursuit of training AI models to make their own music. Sony argues that Udio’s model is to produce audio similar to copyrighted recordings.
Previously, Sony made a bid to add these 30,000 tracks to its original lawsuit, but this was denied by U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, resulting in a second suit.
Sony is seeking as much as $150,000 per song infringed or the actual amount of damages or Udio’s profits made from the infringement, as well as other damages and costs. It has also asked the court to block Udio from using its music to train AI models.
The songs concerned are by prominent artists such as Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton, and Elvis Presley.
“Since the day it launched, Udio has flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service,” Sony said in the lawsuit. “Neither Udio, nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
“As observed in the intervening time since Plaintiffs initiated the original lawsuit against Udio, when those who develop such a service steal copyrighted sound recordings, the service’s synthetic musical outputs inevitably saturate the market with machine-generated content that will compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which the service is built.”
“Generative AI models, including our music model, learn from examples,” Udio said in 2024. “Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source theviolinchannel.com ’
