German court rules AI music generator Suno violated copyrights, rejects fair use defense

German court rules AI music generator Suno violated copyrights, rejects fair use defense Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Aug 1, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER Key Points A Munich court has ruled that AI music generator Suno violates copyrights by training on well-known musical works, following a lawsuit brought by German music rights organization GEMA. The court found that Suno's AI models have effectively memorized songs and, when prompted, reproduce original elements from the source material, a case of copyright infringement. The court placed responsibility for the infringing outputs squarely on Suno rather than its users, since the company chose what training data to use and how to build its models. Ask about this article… Search A Munich court ruled that AI music generator Suno violated copyrights through both its training process and its outputs. The court also applied US law and rejected Suno's fair use defense. GEMA, Germany's music rights organization, had sued for injunction, disclosure, and damages and prevailed on most counts. The case centered on six well-known songs, including "Atemlos durch die Nacht" by Kristina Bach and "Rasputin" by Frank Farian, Fred Jay, and George Reyam. Only the musical compositions were at issue, not the lyrics. Court says memorization is real The court determined that all six tracks are reproducibly contained in Suno's version 3.5 and 4 models. In AI research, this phenomenon is known as memorization: during training, a model may not just learn general patterns but also store specific content from its training data, which can later be pulled back out as outputs.Ad Suno argued that its model doesn't store songs, only "mathematically learned patterns and generalized features." Any similarities in the outputs, the company claimed, were the result of user prompts and statistical correlations.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 For its test, GEMA entered each song's original lyrics, musical style, and title into Suno's generator. It made no specifications about melody, harmony, rhythm, or arrangement. Suno still produced results in which the court recognized the original elements of the source tracks. Given the complexity and length of the songs, the court ruled out coincidence. Suno bears responsibility, not its users The court explicitly held Suno responsible for the infringing outputs, not the users who typed the prompts. Suno had argued that deliberate user input broke the causal chain between the model and its output.Ad The court disagreed. The prompts were "simple and open-ended," and Suno operates the models, selected the songs as training data, and is responsible for the architecture and the memorization. That means the models "substantively determined" the outputs. Simply offering the generator for music creation already constitutes a legal violation, the court said. If this view holds up on appeal, it could affect other AI music services as well. Suno also invoked Germany's text and data mining exception, which allows automated analysis of content under certain conditions. The court ruled that this exception doesn't cover the memorization it found.AdDEC_D_Incontent-2 US fair use doesn't protect Suno either Under a special rule for collecting societies, the court also claimed jurisdiction over claims based on training activities that took place in the United States. It applied US law to those acts and concluded that fair use doesn't protect Suno either.Ad The court drew a line between this case and two US proceedings, Bartz and Kadrey. In both of those cases, American courts had treated AI training as transformative use and thus fair use. The key difference, according to the Munich