Universal and Sony have added an anti-circumvention claim to their copyright case against Suno, alleging the AI music company got its training recordings by getting around YouTube's download protection. They filed the amended complaint in federal court in Massachusetts on August 25. On August 18, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV had allowed them to bring the claim under Section 1201(a) of the DMCA.
The labels say Suno used the open-source tools YT-DL and YT-DLP to bypass YouTube's "rolling cipher," which hides the address of the media file. They cite Suno's own answers to their written questions as support. According to the judge, Suno told the labels in May 2025 that it had downloaded YouTube audio with those tools. The labels first asked to add the claim in September 2025, weeks after Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion over pirated books. In October 2025 Suno asked the court to reject it, arguing that the law covers controls on access rather than on copying, and that YouTube videos are open to anyone. The judge found the claim plausible, but said deciding it will need evidence on how the protection and the tools actually work.
In a second order, Saylor refused to add 61,026 recordings, identified by Audible Magic fingerprinting, to the 560 already in the case. He said the scale of the copying is no defence, but adding that many works would bring complexity and delay. He expects summary judgment on Suno's fair-use defence to settle the main issue. The labels can sue over those works separately, and that case would likely go to him. The extra works would have raised potential statutory damages from about $84 million to more than $9 billion.
The amended complaint seeks up to $150,000 per infringed work and up to $2,500 per act of circumvention. For now the labels are not claiming that Suno's outputs infringe, unless discovery shows they reproduce parts of the recordings. The filing still describes Suno's earlier $125 million round at about a $500 million valuation, although Suno has since raised more than $400 million at $5.4 billion.
Fact discovery closes on September 30. Both sides are then expected to seek summary judgment on whether training on unlicensed recordings is fair use. Two days after these orders, Saylor relied on the first one to keep a similar stream-ripping claim alive in country artist Tony Justice's proposed class action against Suno.
Sources · 1