SOCAN filed a copyright claim against Suno in the Federal Court of Canada on 2 September, the third collecting society to sue and the first since Germany's GEMA won at first instance in July. Where GEMA and Denmark's Koda attacked the training inputs, SOCAN goes after what comes out: 150 Suno tracks it says are identical or substantially similar to songs it represents, and the act of streaming them to Canadian users. It calls the 150 the tip of the iceberg.
The examples are built to be heard. SOCAN's litigation page pairs originals with Suno versions of Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway", Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi", K. Maro, Alexisonfire and Daniel Balavoine. The claim itself compares Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" note by note, saying a user supplied only the lyrics and got back a virtually identical melody and harmony. The Lavigne case is stranger still: a track Suno apparently titled as a K-pop remix and cover, with some lyrics swapped for Korean equivalents.
The money asked for is modest by US standards, damages or profits to be set at trial, or statutory damages of 20,000 Canadian dollars per song, about 2.7 million across the cited works, plus 10 million in punitive damages. The remedy that matters is the injunction: a wide injunction, a tool built for collecting societies, covering every song SOCAN represents now or in future, which it describes as virtually all music in current use in Canada.
SOCAN says it has never licensed Suno or received a royalty from it, quotes Suno's own description of training on virtually all reasonable-quality music online, and turns Suno's recently added guardrails into an admission that it knew and could have acted sooner.
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