Stella Lefty isn't the only one out here ripping off hit songs. Some people are trying to build entire billion-dollar tech businesses out of the practice. Right now, many, many parties are suing Suno, the leading generative AI music platform. Major labels Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are in active litigation against Suno, though Warner Music Group, the other major, settled its own lawsuit by announcing a strategic partnership with Suno last fall. Earlier this week, a group of musicians that includes Jason Isbell and David Lowery filed another Suno lawsuit, this one over name rights rather than copyright infringement. 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. 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.
As you can hear in the video below, some of these AI versions really just appear to be eerie, smoothed-out replications of the originals. The "Sk8er Boi" rip is especially unhinged because it incorporates some Korean for some reason. Suno's output version was titled "Sk8er Boi (K-pop remix) (Avril Lavigne cover)."
In that video, SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown tells the Canadian Press:
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.
Yeah, that looks pretty fucked up! You can see more explanation and examples at Suno's site. 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.
