Suno pushed back aggressively in its first response Americana singer Jason Isbell‘s class-action lawsuit against the AI music generator, arguing his claims that the service allows users to produce tracks based on musicians’ identities amounted to “nothing unlawful” as it moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Isbell joined musicians David Lowery, Guy Forsyth and Eduardo Calle in a federal lawsuit against the AI music company in August, alleging in a push for a class action suit that Suno violates state publicity laws and exploits artists’ identities whenever users call for a track to sound similar to an artist’s output.
But Suno, in its first response to the case on Tuesday, argued that laws couldn’t govern publicity laws in such a fashion and compared the prompting to when musicians ask their human producers for songs to mimic another artist’s tone. When people describe styles of music, they often use artists’ names as shorthand for the genre they perform in,” Suno attorney Andrew Gass wrote in the filing. “The Complaint in this case turns on the premise that the law somehow condemns that universal practice.
An attorney for the plaintiffs did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Suno denied those claims and said that invoking an artist’s name to describe a genre was protected by the First Amendment.
