German court rules AI music generator Suno violated copyrights, rejects fair use defense

A Munich court has ruled that AI music generator Suno violated copyrights, finding that six well-known songs are reproducibly stored in the company’s models—a phenomenon known as memorization. The court held Suno responsible for the infringing outputs, rejecting Germany’s text-and-data-mining exception and applying US law to dismiss a fair use defense. It distinguished this case from US rulings by noting that the songs were proven to be substantially similar and accessible in the outputs, unlike in earlier text-model cases. The ruling is not final, and several questions remain open, including whether targeted prompts reflect normal use and whether circumventing YouTube’s technical protections constitutes piracy. This matters because it sets a legal precedent for how copyright law applies to generative AI models when protected works are reproduced through simple prompts, potentially affecting other AI services and ongoing litigation over training data practices.