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German court finds ‘AI’ outfit liable for copyright
THE MUNICH regional court has found that when an “AI” ingests music it infringes copyright - and when it excretes robo-plagiarism of the music that is infringing too.
GEMA is a music collecting society in Germany. Suno, based in the US state of Delaware, says it is “where music creation has no boundaries. Use just a few words to conjure your next track.”
As a summary from Bird & Bird solicitors puts it, the Landgericht München I found four infringements of the six sample musical compositions in the case: “reproduction for training purposes in the United States; reproduction through memorisation in the model in Germany; communication to the public through the offering of the model; and reproduction and communication to the public through the outputs.”
First, the court had to establish that it had jurisdiction over acts that legally took place in the US. The UK case by the Getty picture agency against stabilityAI partly fell at this hurdle. The German court found that German law on collecting societies gives GEMA the right to a judgment in Germany.
Then it had to apply tests from US law over whether there had been infringement there. It spent 30 pages explaining the US “fair use” doctrine to people used to codified law not common law.
The court found that Suno did not have lawful access to the songs: it has scraped them from YouTube by circumventing download restrictions. No other exception to copyright applied.
Crucially, it held that, because you can get the original out of the “AI” model, the model does copy it. “AI” companies have long argued that they do not copy the works that their models are “trained” on. In doing so they often wield complicated mathematical arguments. The Munich court compared what the model does to a JPEG image file or an MP3 music file - forms of “lossy” encoding. It also heard some of the academic research that has demonstrated the ability to get the “training data” back out. In this it directly contradicted the ruling of the UK court in Getty. The AI model is indeed “memorising” the songs.
The court ordered Suno to stop making the songs available and to disclose its revenues to GEMA. After that it would set damages.
We would expect Suno to appeal. The deadline for lodging an appeal has not yet passed.
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Copyright lawsuit page gema.de in English
Urteil GEMA gegen SUNO - Az. 42 O 763/25 press release from the court, in German