Context: A couple of months ago, German music rights collecting society GEMA sued OpenAI in the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court), alleging the AI provider’s infringement of song lyrics by GEMA’s members (November 14, 2024 ai fray article). At a subsequent press conference, GEMA explained in further detail the reasons for that enforcement action and its primary objective: to achieve clarification in the form of a landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) (November 19, 2024 ai fray article). At the time, GEMA was not wielding copyrights in music per se (melodies, harmonies, rhythms), unlike a group of large music publishers around UMG, Capitol Records, Sony Music and Warner in an infringement case brought against AI provider Suno — an AI service provider that generates music from its internal repertoire — in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts last year (June 24, 2024 complaint (PDF)).
What’s new: Today, GEMA announced its second AI copyright lawsuit, now asserting copyrighted musical compositions against the same defendant as the above-mentioned publishers in the U.S.: Suno (January 21, 2025 GEMA press release). GEMA accuses Suno of generating “audio content that is confusingly similar” to various famous original songs. The press release names compositions that have enjoyed considerable commercial success throughout and even beyond Germany, such as Alphaville’s Forever Young, Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5, Frank Farian’s Daddy Cool and Modern Talking’s Cheri Cheri Lady. While Suno sells premium subscriptions, it apparently does not pay royalties to the authors of the musical works it has ingested and from which it derives melodies on demand.
Direct impact: Based on the two examples GEMA published on its website (Daddy Cool and Forever Young), there is indisputably a prima facie infringement argument. Like in its OpenAI case, GEMA appears to be aiming for a key precedent at the European Union level.
Wider ramifications: Besides dozens of AI-related copyright lawsuits in the United States, there is also a growing international docket with cases in such jurisdictions as India (December 5, 2024 ai fray article), Korea (January 14, 2025 ai fray article) and Canada (December 3, 2024 ai fray article).
In today’s press release, GEMA CEO Dr. Tobias Holzmueller (“Holzmüller” in German) states (in other words) that his organization cannot and will not condone free-riding, and calls on AI providers to take licenses; the chairman of GEMA’s supervisory board, Dr. Ralf Weigand, sees a threat to the very existence of “man-made music in the future,” and GEMA’s general counsel, Dr. Kai Welp, puts the Suno cases into the wider context of “an overall concept of measures taken by GEMA, at the end of which there will be fair treatment of authors and their remuneration.”
An FAQ on GEMA’s website explains that the lawsuit against Suno targets the “public reproduction” of copyrighted works as well as certain related processes:
“GEMA was able to generate numerous audio contents with Suno that are confusingly similar to the original musical works and sound recordings. Under copyright law, this constitutes a public reproduction of these works, which is subject to a licence. Streaming providers on the market acquire licences for these processes.However, the lawsuit also concerns processes within the systems that affect the right of reproduction.GEMA has selected some of the audio content created for the test case and made it the subject of the lawsuit.”
Intellectual property cases filed in Munich are typically adjudicated within about a year, though it can take longer depending on the circumstances. In this case, like in GEMA v. OpenAI, a preliminary reference to the ECJ may be needed in order to obtain clarification under EU copyright law. A preliminary reference is an instrument by which one or more questions of the interpretation of EU law are put before the EU’s top court, whose answers inform the referring national court’s final judgment.