Suno Seeks to Dismiss Jason Isbell Lawsuit, Argues There’s ‘Nothing Unlawful’ About Invoking Artist Names to Describe Genres

Suno pushed back aggressively in its first response Americana singer Jason Isbell‘s class-action lawsuit against the AI music generator, arguing his claims that the service allows users to produce tracks based on musicians’ identities amounted to “nothing unlawful” as it moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

Isbell joined musicians David Lowery, Guy Forsyth and Eduardo Calle in a federal lawsuit against the AI music company in August, alleging in a push for a class action suit that Suno violates state publicity laws and exploits artists’ identities whenever users call for a track to sound similar to an artist’s output.

But Suno, in its first response to the case on Tuesday, argued that laws couldn’t govern publicity laws in such a fashion and compared the prompting to when musicians ask their human producers for songs to mimic another artist’s tone. When people describe styles of music, they often use artists’ names as shorthand for the genre they perform in,” Suno attorney Andrew Gass wrote in the filing. “The Complaint in this case turns on the premise that the law somehow condemns that universal practice.

“Congress made the considered policy choice not to confer intellectual property protection on an artistic style, precisely to allow subsequent creators to build on the prior works of a genre,” Gass added. “The theory of this Complaint would create a shadow state law IP regime sitting on top of and fundamentally conflicting with the federal regime that has been in place for more than two centuries.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

The Isbell group’s case differed from other litigation efforts against Suno by focusing not on the issues of copyright, which have spurred several lawsuits against — and settlements with — the company, but instead on the element of identity, which the plaintiffs claimed is usually retained by a musician regardless of a settlement deal or whether an artist opts into allowing Suno to train on their catalogues.

The plaintiffs claimed Suno retained “voiceprints” of artists users could bypass Suno’s guardrails and access those “prints” through specific prompts that skirt using the artist’s name by asking for tracks invoking their “tone and phrasing,” by using real names instead of stage names (as in the case of the rapper Common) or by adding spaces between the letters of their names (such as “t a y l o r s w i f t” instead of Taylor Swift).

Suno denied those claims and said that invoking an artist’s name to describe a genre was protected by the First Amendment.

“There is nothing unlawful about that,” the Tuesday filing read. “No state confers a right of publicity that prohibits a musician in a studio from saying to their producer, ‘let’s go for something here with more of a Jason Isbell vibe,’ and actually achieving that result without infringing any copyright or creating a likelihood of confusion over the identity of the performer. And what Suno does, by Plaintiffs’ own account, is no different.”