Right now, many parties are suing Suno, the leading generative AI music platform. Now, the performance rights organization SOCAN is presenting its own lawsuit and citing strange ripoffs of some big hits in Canadian federal court. SOCAN is the performance rights nonprofit Society Of Composers, Authors And Music Publishers Of Canada, and it followed Germany’s GEMA and Denmark’s Koda as the third such organization to sue Suno when it filed a lawsuit on Wednesday. Though Warner Music Group, the other major, settled its own lawsuit by announcing a strategic partnership with Suno last fall, major labels like Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are in active litigation against Suno.
SOCAN has built a website that outlines its case against SUNO, which includes 150 tracks that, the organization argues, directly and significantly copy specific songs by Canadian artists. The site singles out a couple of huge hits, Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” and Tom Cochrane’s original “Life Is A Highway” (famously covered by Rascal Flatts on the Cars soundtrack), along with songs by Alexisonfire, K. Maro, and Daniel Balavoine.
Typically in a licensing agreement, there would be a profit sharing. If somebody was getting paid, a portion of the subscription revenue would go to the creators. We don’t want to see these big platforms building on the backs of our creators and then not compensating them at all. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the numbers, but Suno’s now valued at $5.4 billion US. That’s significant. They have a significant number of subscribers. In Canada, they’re not paying anybody. SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown tells the Canadian Press.
In the lawsuit, SOCAN demands statutory damages of $20,000 Canadian per song, the maximum amount that Canadian copyright law allows, plus any profits that Suno earned from the infringement and overall “wilful and knowing infringement” punitive damages of $10 million Canadian. They also want a “wide injunction” remedy built for collecting societies on any song that SOCAN covers now or in the future.
