SOCAN, Canada’s non-profit music rights organization, is suing AI music generation platform Suno, accusing it of infringing on the rights of more than 150 Canadian artists without their consent or providing proper compensation.
“SOCAN has a responsibility to act when the rights of music creators and publishers are put at risk. The evidence shows that the Suno platform has generated and streamed outputs that copy works in our repertoire, and that cannot go unchallenged,” SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown said in a press release on Wednesday. “Innovation can’t come at the expense of human creativity. The future of music must belong to the people who make it.”
The release also said that the legal action is a “necessary and proactive step to ensure that human music creation is valued, respected, and compensated.” The organization added that it expects more violations to come to light as litigation moves forward.
Alongside the lawsuit, which was filed in Canadian federal court on Wednesday, SOCAN has launched a website comparing Suno outputs to songs by Canadian artists like Tom Cochrane and Avril Lavigne. The Suno clips play nearly note-for-note and word-for-word replicas of popular songs like “Life is a Highway.” The lawsuit’s claims have yet to be proven in court. BetaKit has reached out to Suno for comment.
Is it definitely weird to see the public go from hating copyright trolls to now seeing them as allies
This is one of the few times I’ve thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.
It’s a shame both sides can’t lose. Nevertheless, I wish them luck in the legal battle.
How is this a copyright troll though?
You miss my point, how is this non profit a troll? It is suing a corporation on behalf of artists.
It’s equally weird to see the some people siding with billionaires and tech conglomerates instead of with the working class. It’s almost as if there’s more nuance to things than people who live online think…
The sad truth of our time is that richest for-profit tech corporations on Earth are making buckets of money through the exploitation of the intellectual labor of the creative class.
It was already hard enough to make a living as an artist or musician before… Now artists are being told that they have to compete in a market of finite demand against an infinite supply of generative AI slop that only exists as a byproduct of their own stolen work.
Considering there would be no AI product without the training data, it’s pretty much unconscionable that tech companies like Suno can make endless profit off of the work of others without even so much as consent, let alone compensation.
Adversity makes strange bedfellows
Yep, many piracy advocates are suddenly appalled by piracy. Truth is I don’t think many of them ever actually formed a real opinion.
I don’t see any contradiction, piracy is fine when it’s just for personal use, not when you intend to use it to make money, directly or otherwise.
Eh, I see many just hate the hypocrisy.
