Suno Loses Landmark AI Copyright Ruling to GEMA in Munich

The Munich I Regional Court ruled on July 31 that Suno, the US-based AI music generator, infringed copyrights held by GEMA, Germany's music collecting society, by training its models on protected songs without a licence. Reuters reported the decision, which a Bird & Bird case note describes as the first ruling in Europe on AI-generated music.

The evidence was concrete. Six well-known works from GEMA's repertoire, including 'Atemlos durch die Nacht', 'Daddy Cool', 'Rasputin', 'Big in Japan', 'Forever Young' and the refrain of 'Mambo No. 5', were found to be reproducibly contained in Suno's v3.5 and v4 models. The 42nd Civil Chamber, under presiding judge Elke Schwager, rejected Suno's defence under the text-and-data-mining exception in Section 44b of the German Copyright Act, finding that memorisation of entire works goes beyond permitted analysis. The court also accepted evidence that Suno used stream-ripping techniques to extract audio from YouTube, circumventing the rolling cipher intended to prevent downloading.

Why this matters beyond one company: the court ordered Suno to cease the unauthorised reproduction, stop using the works to train the model, disclose revenues linked to the infringement so damages can be calculated, and set a fine of up to 250,000 euros per future breach, with custodial detention of up to six months as an alternative. According to Variety's writeup, the ruling also asserted German jurisdiction over training conducted in the US on the basis that outputs served to EU users bring the service within EU law. If that reasoning survives appeal, 'we trained in America' stops being a shield the moment a European hits generate.

The honest caveats are that damages remain unquantified, the judgment can be appealed to the Munich Court of Appeal, and Suno has said it disagrees and will evaluate its options including an appeal. What the reporting does not settle is the operational question that actually determines cost: whether Suno will have to retrain v3.5 and v4 without the GEMA repertoire or only gate outputs for German users.

For rightsholders, and for AI music startups that have already signed catalogue deals, this is a workable template rather than a symbolic win. Collecting societies elsewhere in Europe now have a concrete playbook, and a 'licensed corpus' pitch just became easier to make to any team building generative audio for EU users.