Music Generator Suno Aims to Curb AI Music Spam and Improve Copyright Protection

Suno, an AI music generator, has been criticized for allegedly training on copyrighted material and for its generated songs competing with human music. A German court recently ruled that Suno used copyrighted songs during training and can reproduce them with prompting, making the US fair-use principle inapplicable. Suno's CEO Mikey Shulman outlined four principles and new measures, including a training strategy called 'Original Creation, By Design' to reduce unauthorized reproductions, and noted they avoid artist names in training metadata. Suno also works with Audible Magic and Musixmatch to check uploaded audio and text for unauthorized use. The company announced a new download policy to limit mass distribution of songs, targeting large-scale abuse without affecting most users. Transparency tools will be introduced to identify AI-generated songs on other platforms, and community guidelines have been clarified to prohibit replicating existing songs, uploading material without rights, using someone's voice or likeness without permission, spam, fake engagement, bot use, and deceptive audio. A man was previously sentenced for uploading hundreds of thousands of AI songs to fraudulently collect $8 million in royalties.