Udio has filed its formal response to the second, larger copyright suit Sony Music brought against it in late July. The AI music service disputes the label's claims one by one, even though it now holds licences with Universal, Warner, Merlin, Kobalt, Believe and the NMPA.
The filing again concedes that Udio took audio from YouTube to train its models and used the stream-ripping tool yt-dlp to collect part of that data. That admission matters because several other AI cases turn on whether YouTube's protections count as copy controls or access controls under the DMCA.
Udio's main defence is fair use: it argues training is an invisible back-end step that yields a new, non-infringing product. It also accuses Sony of copyright misuse tied to anticompetitive conduct, among a long list of other defences.
The breadth of those defences points to a trial that is still far off. The first Sony case against Udio is more than two years old, with a status conference set for late October.
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