AI music companies Suno and Udio have hired elite law firm Latham & Watkins to defend them against lawsuits filed by the three major labels in late June, according to court documents. Filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group (UMG), the lawsuits claim that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.” Latham & Watkins has already played a key role in defending top companies in the field of artificial intelligence.
This includes the firm’s work to defend Anthropic against allegations of infringement levied by UMG, Concord Music Group and ABKCO last October. Latham represents OpenAI in all of its lawsuits filed by authors and other rights owners, including the case filed by the New York Times and a case filed by comedian Sarah Silverman and other writers. The Latham team is led by Andrew Gass , Steve Feldman , Sy Damle , Britt Lovejoy and Nate Taylor .
Plaintiffs UMG, WMG and Sony Music are represented by Moez Kaba , Mariah Rivera , Alexander Perry and Robert Klieger of Hueston Hennigan as well as Daniel Cloherty of Cloherty & Steinberg. It is common for AI companies to argue that training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people.
