Suno's lawsuits explained: Reservoir, UMG/Sony and your tracks

On October 21, 2026, Music Business Worldwide reported:

Reservoir has sued Suno, alleging that the AI music company copied 1,050 of Reservoir’s compositions to train its models without permission. The complaint, obtained by Music Business Worldwide, was filed on Wednesday (October 21) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. … Songs in Reservoir’s catalog named in the complaint include Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, and Evanescence’s Bring Me to Life.

The complaint states:

Suno’s business model was admittedly and clearly: infringe now, make billions by being the first mover, and try to settle on the cheap later. Seeking forgiveness is clearly more profitable than permission, which they obviously could have done but consciously chose not to do.

On damages, MBW reported:

Reservoir is seeking actual damages and Suno’s profits or, alternatively, statutory damages of up to USD $150,000 per work willfully infringed. The complaint puts that total at $157.5 million for the 1,050 works. … Across the three counts, the figures pleaded come to just over $186 million.

Universal and Sony

A month earlier, MBW reported:

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have sued Suno for a second time. The joint complaint, filed on Friday (September 18) in Boston federal court, accuses the AI music company of copying 60,202 of the labels’ sound recordings, without a license, and using them to build the models that run its music generation service. … Chief Product Officer Jack Brody told MBW at launch that “v6 was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up,” on data that “doesn’t include data from Universal or Sony.”

The labels’ complaint states:

Training a “new” model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6. Nor can Suno’s users who generated the outputs in the first instance cure the defect. Whatever rights users purport to grant Suno in their generated outputs, no user can license expression that Suno’s models derived from Plaintiffs’ recordings.

Suno’s October 20 answer pleads fair use:

Suno’s AI service uses a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product. This is quintessential fair use.

Your tracks

On downloads, MBW reported in August:

Importantly, the seven permitted downloads on the new free tier are cleared for personal use only, meaning a free user can keep the file but cannot put the song on streaming services such as Spotify, sell it, or use it in commercial work. … From September 3, a song sitting in a paying subscriber’s library cannot be released, sold, or licensed until a download has been ‘spent’ on it.

For Pro and Premier subscribers, the Terms of Service state:

Suno hereby assigns to you all of its right, title and interest in and to any Output owned by Suno and generated from Submissions made by you through the Service … Due to the nature of machine learning, Suno makes no representation or warranty to you that any copyright will vest in any Output.

Reservoir’s complaint adds:

The Suno terms and conditions grant Suno a “perpetual, irrevocable” license to train on all user-uploaded content.