Google filed a motion on June 8 in federal court in Illinois asking for the proposed class action over its Lyria 3 music model to be dismissed with prejudice. Its main defence is contractual: by uploading songs to YouTube, it argues, the musicians gave YouTube and its affiliates, Google included, a broad royalty-free licence to use and adapt their content.
The suit was filed in March by independent artists including singer-songwriter Sam Kogon, composer Magnus Fiennes, producer Michael Mell and members of the Chicago band Directrix. They say Google trained Lyria 3, which launched in the Gemini app in February and makes 30-second songs from prompts, on their YouTube recordings without permission or pay, and that owning YouTube and Content ID gives Google unfair leverage. All but one of them had already sued Suno and Udio.
Google attacks each claim in turn. It says the DMCA claims fail for lack of standing because no infringing output or concrete harm is identified, that the contributory claim cannot meet the inducement test from the Supreme Court's March ruling in Cox v. Sony, and that the artists' voices are not famous enough to support a false-endorsement claim. It calls the Illinois biometric-privacy claim over alleged voiceprints speculation, pointing to an open-source relative of Lyria that it says holds no such data.
Google's lawyers also cast the case as resting on an unsupported guess that its model was trained on these particular songs, and reminded the court that YouTube paid the music industry more than $8 billion in a year. The case sits alongside the label-backed suits against Suno and Udio, several of which have since turned into licensing deals.
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