SOCAN sues Suno, alleging unpaid copying of Canadian music

The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, known as SOCAN, has sued U.S. artificial intelligence company Suno in Federal Court, alleging its music generator copied songs in SOCAN’s repertoire without permission or compensation. The claim includes Nickelback’s 2005 hit “Photograph” and alleges infringement of performing rights through the generation and streaming of AI outputs that replicate human-created songs. The allegations have not been proven in court.

SOCAN says it identified hundreds of outputs with substantially similar elements to works in its repertoire and cited 150 examples in its claim, including AI-generated versions of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8terboi” and Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway.” It has created a website pairing some outputs with the songs they allegedly replicate. The examples described have similar melodies, rhythms, chord progressions and much of the same lyrics, though with different voices; the Lavigne example also includes some Korean words.

Suno generates music from text prompts and was valued at US$5.4 billion in its latest funding round. Its chief executive said earlier this year that it had more than two million paid subscribers and more than 100 million users. Suno says on its website that it trains models on publicly available music files and related metadata from third-party sites on the open internet. It did not respond by Wednesday’s deadline to requests for comment by email and social media message.

SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown said the organization wants creators paid when their music is used. SOCAN would not discuss precisely how it obtained its evidence, but said the allegedly infringing outputs were available through ordinary use of the platform. The claim says Suno encourages users to publish creations on its platform and upload them to Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music for commercial exploitation. SOCAN seeks damages and orders requiring Suno to comply with copyright law and stop making allegedly infringing outputs available.

Brown said SOCAN pursued licensing discussions with Suno but made no meaningful progress. She also framed the dispute as one of cultural sovereignty, saying large U.S. technology companies should not treat Canadian songs and stories as data for training machines.

Suno faces separate U.S. legal challenges, including a proposed class action filed Tuesday by singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and three other artists alleging commercial exploitation of their identities without consent. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company also faces copyright suits from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Round Hill Music. Suno has argued that training on publicly available material is fair use under U.S. law.

Halifax entertainment lawyer Matthew Gorman said fair use is not part of Canadian copyright law, which instead has a conceptually similar fair-dealing framework for specified purposes including research and private study. He said it remains to be seen whether fair-dealing or fair-use arguments will succeed in litigation over AI training inputs. A German court recently ruled against Suno in a case brought by rights organization GEMA, finding unlawful use of copyrighted works to train its AI music system; Suno said it disagreed. SOCAN is also working with Musical AI on tools to identify music underlying AI outputs and develop a compensation framework for rights holders.