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Sony hits Udio with 30,117-song lawsuit
Sony filed a new lawsuit against Udio covering 30,117 recordings, arguing the startup’s own licensing deals undermine its fair use defense.
Image: TNW
Sony has filed a fresh lawsuit against Udio in New York, escalating its fight with the music startup from 333 songs to 30,117 recordings, according to Billboard. The move sets up a much larger damages claim and sharpens one of the central questions in AI copyright law: whether training on unlicensed music can qualify as fair use.
Sony’s argument leans on Udio’s own business deals. Since the earlier case began, Udio has signed training licenses with Universal, Warner, Kobalt, Merlin, Believe, and a US publishers' group. Sony says those agreements show there is already a real market for licensing training data, undercutting Udio’s claim that no such market exists.
“A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs.”
The new suit is also a procedural workaround. Sony had tried to add the 30,000 songs to its original 2024 case, but last month Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected that request, saying it would delay the trial while noting Sony could file a separate complaint.
Sony says the larger tally came after discovery gave it access to Udio’s training data. Using audio fingerprinting, the company says it matched hundreds of thousands of Sony recordings, making the 333 songs in the first case a “minuscule” sample.
The complaint includes three claims:
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- copying modern recordings
- copying older pre-1972 recordings
- stripping YouTube protections to rip audio in violation of anti-circumvention law
Udio has acknowledged pulling material from YouTube, as rival Suno did, while maintaining that the practice is fair use. Sony is seeking the statutory maximum of $150,000 per track and wants a jury trial. As The Verge noted, the song list spans artists including Elvis, Beyoncé, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, and Michael Jackson.
Sony is framing itself as pro-licensing rather than anti-AI, pointing to its own agreements with Spotify and startup Klay. But the case reaches beyond music: fair use for training remains unresolved across copyright lawsuits involving books, film, and other media. A ruling from the Manhattan court on Sony’s market-harm theory could shape how AI companies are expected to pay for training data far beyond the recording industry.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via TNW
