Suno is facing another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time from production duo The American Dollar through their company Poseidon Wave Media. The claim follows the same broad legal theory seen in earlier actions from artists and labels, but it stands out because John Emanuele and Richard Cupolo make ambient instrumental music that has long been heavily licensed for television, film and advertising. Their music has been used by Apple, Colgate, Warner Brothers, and TV programmes including ‘Keeping Up with Kardashians’ and ‘CSI Miami’.
The duo say that, “for almost 20 years” sync licensing was “the largest source” of revenue because their “purely instrumental recordings” are well suited to audio-visual use. They claim that licensing revenue from the use of their music in audio-visual productions has “reduced by nearly 80% since Suno launched its service”, adding, “there is a clear line of demarcation in revenue fall-off dated from the public launch of Suno’s Artificial Intelligence service”. That allegation could become central to the fair use dispute, because one of the criteria in US copyright law looks at whether the use harms the market value of the original works.
The music industry’s argument is that Suno trained its generative Artificial Intelligence model on existing music without permission and now produces large volumes of competing tracks. In streaming, that could mean Artificial Intelligence-generated music takes a share of a fixed royalty pool, reducing income for human-made recordings. But the report notes that this argument can be harder to press when major music companies also maintain that Artificial Intelligence-generated music has not gained much traction on streaming platforms. The more immediate threat may be in sync licensing, where instrumental music creators are more directly exposed to competition from generated tracks.
A second legal hurdle is the distinction Artificial Intelligence companies draw between “micro” and “macro” market dilution. They argue that fair use only weighs against cases where a new work competes directly with a specific original work, not where a system is trained on a broader category such as instrumental music and then produces different works within that category. Emanuele and Cupolo’s lawyers will need to challenge that position as the case develops. Because sync licensing is such a significant part of the duo’s business and appears to have been hit hard by generative Artificial Intelligence, the lawsuit could become an important test of how market harm is assessed.
