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Sony Music Entertainment<\/a> has filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against Udio, asserting 30,117 sound recordings it says the AI music company copied without permission to train its generative AI models.<\/p>\n The complaint, obtained and first reported by MBW, was filed on Monday (July 20) in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. You can read it in full here.<\/a><\/p>\n It follows a June 29 ruling in which the same court denied Sony<\/a>\u2018s bid to add more than 30,000 of those recordings to its existing case against Udio.<\/p>\n The suit is brought by Sony Music Entertainment alongside nine affiliated labels, including Arista Records, LaFace, and others.<\/p>\n Sony and its subsidiaries first sued Udio in June 2024<\/a>, in litigation coordinated by the RIAA<\/a> on behalf of the major labels.<\/p>\n Discovery in that original case allowed Sony to inspect Udio\u2019s training data and identify hundreds of thousands of its recordings using audio fingerprinting, according to the new complaint.<\/p>\n The 30,117 works asserted in the new suit are a subset of those matches, which the labels describe as \u201conly a small portion\u201d of the recordings Udio infringed.<\/p>\n In its June 29 ruling<\/a>, the court denied Sony leave to add the recordings to the original case but recognized that \u201cPlaintiffs have the right to seek to stop infringement of, and recover damages for, all copyrighted works.\u201d<\/p>\n The court held only that \u201cthere is no requirement that it be done in [that] lawsuit,\u201d language Sony cites as the basis for filing the new action.<\/p>\n \u201cUdio\u2019s belated embrace of licensing only underscores the unlawfulness of its decision to copy Plaintiffs\u2019 copyrighted sound recordings, without a license, in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n Sony Music complaint against Udio<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In answering the original complaint, Udio admitted that its models were \u201cconstructed by showing the program a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings,\u201d and that those recordings \u201cpresumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case.\u201d<\/p>\n The new complaint also carries claims that Udio obtained many of the recordings by \u201cstream ripping\u201d them from YouTube<\/a> using the tool YT-DLP, circumventing the platform\u2019s technological protections.<\/p>\n Udio has acknowledged obtaining audio data from YouTube<\/a> for use as training data, while arguing that its use of copyrighted music amounts to fair use.<\/p>\n Since launching,\u00a0Udio<\/strong>\u00a0has struck licensing deals with rightsholders including\u00a0Universal Music Group<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0Warner Music Group<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0Merlin<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0Kobalt<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0Believe<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and the\u00a0National Music Publishers\u2019 Association<\/a><\/strong>, according to the complaint.<\/p>\n Sony is the only major music company yet to reach a licensing agreement with Udio<\/a>, having declined to settle where Universal and Warner did.<\/p>\n The complaint argues that Udio\u2019s \u201cbelated embrace of licensing\u201d underscores what the labels call the unlawfulness of copying their recordings without a license \u201cin the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n The suit brings three claims: infringement of post-1972 recordings, infringement of pre-1972 recordings protected under the Music Modernization Act, and circumvention of technological measures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.<\/p>\n Sony is seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed, plus up to $2,500 for each act of circumvention, along with an injunction.<\/p>\n Udio, developed by Uncharted Labs, was founded by former Google<\/a> DeepMind researchers and launched its service in April 2024, and is led by co-founder and CEO Andrew Sanchez.<\/p>\n The complaint frames Udio\u2019s conduct as \u201ca mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service,\u201d stating the company has \u201cflouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry\u201d since the day it launched.<\/p>\n Udio\u2019s rival\u00a0Suno\u00a0continues to face parallel copyright infringement claims from\u00a0Universal Music Group<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Sony Music\u00a0in the\u00a0US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n