GEMA, Suno and the Turning Tide on AI Scraping

For the best part of three years the argument from the AI music platforms has run along a single well-worn groove. The machine does not copy, it learns. It listens the way a young producer listens, absorbing thousands of records until something new falls out, so no single track is lifted and no single rights holder is owed. It was a tidy story, and it held for as long as nobody could open the box and prove otherwise. On the last day of July, a court in Munich opened the box.

The 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich Regional Court ruled that Suno, the American platform valued this year at around 5.4 billion dollars, had breached copyright by training on and reproducing music it never licensed. The case was brought by GEMA, the German society representing more than 100,000 composers, lyricists and publishers, and it was won on almost every point. The court ordered Suno to disclose what it had earned from the infringement and to pay damages yet to be set. Under German procedure a judgment of this kind can be enforced while an appeal is pending, so GEMA need not wait years to act.

What makes the ruling worth reading is the evidence. GEMA’s lawyers did not argue in the abstract. They sat at the prompt box, typed in the lyrics, style and title of works they represent, and generated outputs. The court found that six well-known songs, among them Alphaville’s Forever Young, Boney M’s Daddy Cool and Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5, were reproducibly contained within Suno’s version 3.5 and version 4 models, which sat on servers in Germany. The resemblance in melody, harmony and rhythm was, the chamber found, too specific to be coincidental. The learning story did not survive contact with the outputs.

Suno has pushed back hard, arguing the decision mischaracterises how its technology works and how American law applies, and it is weighing an appeal. But the company had already admitted, before the trial began, that it trained on these works without paying licence fees. The dispute was never about whether the material went in. It was about whether anyone had to be paid for it. Munich decided that they did.

It would be a mistake to read this as one eccentric result in one jurisdiction. This is GEMA’s second win inside a year, after a November ruling that ChatGPT had reproduced protected lyrics, and the pattern reaches well beyond Germany. The United States Copyright Office concluded in 2025 that on training, fair use generally favours the copyright owner. The largest copyright settlement in American history now stands at 1.5 billion dollars, agreed by Anthropic over pirated books. In Britain the government reversed itself, its Culture Secretary confirming that copyright material cannot be used for AI training without permission. And the European Union’s AI Act now requires anyone selling a general-purpose model into the bloc to publish a summary of what they trained it on, stripping away the fog that made quiet scraping possible.

The industry has matched the courts. Sony continues to litigate against both Suno and Udio, and more than 1,800 artists have lined up behind the class actions. Where the majors have settled, as Warner did with Suno and Universal with Udio, they did not simply bank a cheque. They took licensing structures and equity, a sign they mean to be paid on an ongoing basis rather than once. Train on our work if you like, the message runs, but license it and account for it.

For those of us who came up in this culture, the temptation is to treat all this as a boardroom fight between people none of us warmed to, the tech firms and the major-label machinery. That would be a comfortable misreading. The underground has always run on a simple bargain. You make something, it gets played, and some proportion of what it generates finds its way back to you, however modest, however delayed. That is precisely what unlicensed scraping breaks. A model trained on the accumulated labour of every producer who ever uploaded a track, and paying none of them, is not a democratising force. It is the oldest move in the industry in new clothes, value taken from creators who were never asked and never paid.

None of this settles the larger question. The appeals will run, the American courts are still feeling toward a fact-specific test rather than a blanket rule, and the technology will not stop while the lawyers argue. But the ground has shifted. For three years the platforms enjoyed a defence that could not easily be tested. Munich has shown that it can be, and that when it is, the box does not always contain what the sales pitch promised. That is the line the court drew, and the rest of the industry, with a growing chorus of legal scholars, now stands on the same side of it.

by Damion Pell

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