Suno asks judge to dismiss Jason Isbell's publicity-rights class action

Suno has answered the publicity-rights class action brought by singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and asked the judge to throw out the entire case. The AI music company's filing argues that the complaint, whatever it calls itself, does not describe a violation of anyone's right to control their name or persona, and that to the extent it describes anything, it is a copyright complaint under another label.

The lawsuit is unusual among the cases Suno faces. The music industry's other suits go after the use of recordings to train the model, which lets Suno lean on a fair-use defence. This one claims that Suno infringes musicians' publicity rights, known as personality rights in some countries, so that defence is not available in the same way. These rights are also the ones that matter for AI-made digital replicas of a performer's voice or likeness, which is why the outcome will be watched beyond this one dispute.

“the portion of the model that processes a user’s prompt never even sees an artist’s name”

Suno, in its filing, in the court filing · completemusicupdate.com ↗

The plaintiffs' complaint says Suno's model indexes musicians by name so that it can produce music in the style of existing artists, drawing on each one's identifying attributes without consent. It alleges that during training Suno paired audio with the names of the musicians who made it. As evidence of what the system does, it says that asking for Taylor Swift brought up the labels pop, country, country pop and synth-pop. It also says a request for Hector Lavoe was rejected, yet with no fresh prompt Suno then produced a salsa track imitating his bright, naturally slightly nasal vocals.

Suno's reply starts with how the product works. Its lawyers say the interface does not display artist names, offer a menu of them or even hint at them in its prompts. If a user types an artist's name anyway, the name is swapped out and replaced with suggested styles and genres that describe that artist, and Suno says a third-party tool supplies those descriptions. The filing gives an example: in place of Jason Isbell, the system would offer a contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with finger-picked acoustic guitar and clear male vocals with a country twang. Complete Music Update's own illustration is a prompt for Duran Duran turning into something like new wave, synth-pop and pop rock.

The company adds that its training material contains no field for artist names and that the model is not taught to recognise them. In Suno's account, the part of the system that handles a prompt never receives the name at all. It says this is part of the platform's architecture, and that the model is not built to output music that could be passed off as an existing artist's work. Suno also notes that the complaint never claims that a description mentions an artist by name or implies the artist endorsed the result.

On the law, Suno says no US state gives a publicity right broad enough to stop a musician from telling a producer in a studio that they want something in the manner of a given artist, provided the result does not copy his songs or suggest he took part. The plaintiffs are, in its words, trying to control a sonic style, and invoking names adds nothing different to their claims. Suno's own filing concedes that what an artist's name summons is a sound: genre, instrumentation, vocal timbre and phrasing that were learned from the plaintiffs' recordings. That is the basis of its second argument, that the suit is a copyright claim in disguise and should be dismissed on that ground.

Complete Music Update points out that the two arguments sit awkwardly together, and notes that voice soundalikes have been held to fall outside copyright, which is exactly why they can be handled under publicity rights. The plaintiffs, for their part, say the name-to-style mapping shows Suno ties names to musical identities and runs an in-the-style-of service. The report also observes that Spotify restricted access to its audio-features data for new developers in November 2024, an example of the kind of dataset that could be used to build such a mapping. No ruling date has been given, and it is not yet known whether the judge will accept Suno's arguments.