The Munich Regional Court found on Friday that Suno violated copyright law by training its AI music model on protected compositions without a licence, ordering the platform to disclose revenue tied to the infringement and holding it liable for damages yet to be quantified.
GEMA’s case centered on six specific works whose melodic, harmonic and rhythmic structures the court found reproduced in Suno’s outputs: Alphaville’s “Forever Young” and “Big in Japan”, Boney M.’s “Daddy Cool” and “Rasputin”, Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5”, and Atemlos by Kristina Bach. Evidence presented at the March hearing showed Suno had extracted these tracks directly from YouTube, bypassing a technical protection measure called Rolling Cipher that was designed to prevent automated downloads.
How the court ruled on Suno’s core defense
Suno argued that encoding audio into statistical model weights does not constitute copyright reproduction since no discrete audio file is stored. The court rejected this, ruling that embedding musical characteristics into a neural network’s parameters satisfies the legal definition of physical fixation under EU copyright law, the same doctrine it applied in its 2025 ruling against OpenAI over song lyrics. The text and data mining exemptions Suno cited were also dismissed, with the court finding that commercial generative models producing substitutive outputs fall outside their scope.
GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmueller called it “a verdict of global significance.” Suno, valued at $5.4 billion following a June funding round, said it disagrees and will evaluate all options including an appeal. The ruling is expected to influence how labels and platforms approach AI music licensing across the European market.
Original reporting by Reuters here.
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