Photo Credit: Eminem by swimfinfan / CC by 2.0
Eminem’s publishing company, Eight Mile Style, has now filed litigation against Suno for allegedly reproducing their copyrighted works without permission or compensation. Digital Music News was given a first look at the complaint.
Eight Mile Style, Eminem’s publishing company that owns or controls the exclusivity to his catalog, has now filed a lawsuit against AI company Suno. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the company trained its AI models on 269 musical compositions without permission or compensation and enables its users to reproduce “sound recordings based on prompts.”
According to the filing, shared ahead of the weekend with Digital Music News, Suno made “illicit copies of millions of copyrighted musical works, including Eight Mile Style’s,” then created a platform where users pay to create songs based on those unauthorized copies.
Court documents cite 404 Media’s report that revealed Suno used a piracy service to scrape “millions of songs and lyrics” from digital service providers, including YouTube Music and Deezer, and lyrics site Genius. Among its evidence, the lawsuit provides an example in which Suno’s platform was used to generate Eminem’s classic, “Lose Yourself,” including the verbatim lyrics of the original song.
Eight Mile Style is seeking damages that could exceed $40 million. The publisher asks the court to find that Suno infringed its copyright willfully, as well as order the surrender (or destruction) of all unauthorized copies of their works in the company’s possession.
“Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist’s work,” said Suno in a statement. “To protect against this, we do not allow prompts for specific artists’ names and songs and work with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential misuse. We are always working to strengthen our guardrails, and we will continue to add new safeguards that protect artists and our users.”
Eight Mile’s latest lawsuit follows a federal judge’s ruling in June that denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the publisher’s copyright infringement claim, allowing the case to move forward. Eminem’s publisher sued the Facebook parent company last year with allegations that its catalog was featured across the music libraries of Meta’s platforms despite lacking a valid license.
