According to reporting by Variety, Reuters, and The Verge, the court found Suno in breach of both German and U.S. copyright law by training its systems on songs from the repertoire of GEMA, Germany's performing-rights society, and by storing and reproducing them. The ruling requires Suno to disclose any "illicit revenue" tied to the works and to pay unspecified damages. For ongoing coverage of the legal battles reshaping the artificial-intelligence industry, follow our latest AI news.
What the Court Decided
The Munich Regional Court's decision covers both model training and output generation. It requires AI companies to pay for licenses for "the systematic use of GEMA's repertoire and its commercial exploitation," GEMA said in a press release. The case centered on six well-known tracks — "Atemlos," "Daddy Cool," "Rasputin," "Big in Japan," "Forever Young," and "Mambo No. 5" — which GEMA said it was able to essentially reproduce through basic prompting on Suno's platform.
"Today, the Chamber made one thing crystal clear: AI models built on stolen intellectual property have no protection under the law," GEMA CEO Dr. Tobias Holzmüller said in a statement. "AI service providers must pay for licenses rather than helping themselves to our members' works free of charge."
GEMA, which represents around 100,000 composers, lyricists, and music publishers in Germany, accused Suno of ingesting its members' works to train its models without licensing them — something Suno had partially admitted in a 2024 U.S. court filing. "Suno's training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like," the company wrote in that filing.
Suno Pushes Back
A representative for Suno said the company disagrees with the ruling and is evaluating an appeal. "From the beginning, we trained our models to create new songs, not reproduce existing ones, and built protections into our platform," the spokesperson told Variety. "We disagree with today's ruling — which rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of how Suno's technology works, how it is used and how U.S. law applies — and are evaluating all available options, including an appeal."
The decision is a first-instance ruling and can still be appealed to a higher court, Reuters noted. Even so, it adds to mounting legal pressure on generative-AI companies. A separate report from 404 Media indicated that Suno had scraped material from YouTube, while in the United States the three major labels — Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group — sued Suno in 2024. Warner reached a licensing agreement with Suno last November, but Universal and Sony remain plaintiffs in a case expected to be decided next year.
A Broader Pattern of Copyright Wins
The GEMA victory fits a wider pattern of rightsholders notching wins against AI developers. Roughly nine months ago, GEMA won a separate lawsuit against OpenAI over the use of unlicensed song lyrics in training. In the United States, Anthropic was recently ordered to pay roughly $1.5 billion to a collective of authors — described as the largest copyright settlement in American history — after a judge found that, while training on the works could qualify as fair use, the company had pirated the material to do so.
Copyright holders have argued that generative-AI companies would not exist without their work. "These tools are extraordinary, but they could not have been built without us," ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus, now president of the international rights society CISAC, said in a recent speech. GEMA's broader goal is to establish a legal framework across the European Union that reckons with AI companies' prior use of copyrighted material and creates a path forward — including a proposed licensing system for AI companies' use of music.
For Suno, the stakes are considerable. The company recently raised $400 million in a Series D round, lifting its valuation to $5.4 billion even as the legal questions at the heart of its business model remain unresolved. The Munich ruling, while appealable, signals that European courts are increasingly willing to treat unlicensed training data as infringement rather than fair use — a precedent that could reshape how every generative-AI company operating in Europe sources its data.
Stay Ahead of AI
From courtroom rulings to frontier model releases, the artificial-intelligence landscape is moving fast. Bookmark AI Buzz Wire for ongoing coverage of the policy fights and breakthroughs defining the industry.
Read more AI policy news →
