This is the part where I don't really understand the purpose of this. You create something, and then upload it to the AI to lose copyright protection on it; meanwhile feeding the AI your original material. What is there to even gain by doing this? We have plugins which will generate notes and chords, harmonies, melodies, or anything else you might want to use instead. They will get you past some kind of writers block situation too; just with some more work. Even if you do get some musical parts from AI, why wouldn't you just deconstruct them to make them into original material again, like you would with Midi files or Samples?

 

If you have a premium subscription, yes, you still hold the rights. However, suno holds the right to train on your music the second you upload, as well as whatever is generated.

 

This is not accurate. Your Suno subscription status cannot change copyright laws. The Company (Suno) grant you specific terms of usage based on your subscription type and their Terms of Service. That's all they can do. If something is output from AI, those portions of the work are not protected. If they are created by you, then they may be protected. If your track is 100% output from Suno, or other AI; it cannot be granted Copyright at all. Not even by The Company (Suno) which owns the AI service you used.

They can use anything you submit to it and anything generated by that submission to train, as you stated in your post.

Using Suno's Terms of Service as a source of information about music copyrights is like taking a forensic accounting course taught by Bernie Madoff.

 

Last edited: Jul 9, 2025 at 6:46 AM

you would hold the rights as the original creator of the "acoustic guitar and vocals" track, and while i have not done a deep dive on the copyright law, i believe you can copyright it as long as you contributed to it / change it, i forget what the exact terminology they used is. Generating a song from simply prompting Suno is not copyrightable, thats for sure.

 

The invention of the internet, also known as the world wide web, was already a groundbreaking invention, but people didn't know how to deal with it in the beginning.

Gradually, legislators passed laws and, while some were regulated, some remain in a gray area, and some things, like AI, are only partially regulated by law. Added to this are enormous amounts of data and regulations that hardly anyone can read or understand. The criminal energy associated with fraud and theft by some of our fellow human beings is also unbearable.

Convicting and prosecuting perpetrators is a huge task for the justice system, as the perpetrators are based abroad and conceal their identities. A great deal of time and intelligence must be invested to protect and secure one's own music, one's own presets, sound sets, etc.

Even this small contribution is scanned by the AI and incorporated into the responses.
Everything digital is somehow utilized and evaluated. Legally, this can be summarized in one sentence:

Protecting Music – Brief and Concise

Musical works characterized by the necessary degree of individuality and creativity are automatically subject to copyright protection upon creation. Therefore, registration is not necessary to protect music. Copyright law also allows for legal action against infringements.

 

Sounds good bro

 

I think, this is a grey zone, when AI is involved, as for the usual cases the lawyers say this:
https://www.lawinfo.com/resources/i...is-the-difference-between-form-pa-and-fo.html

 

I'm no lawyer but the Terms of Service - Suno AI seem pretty straight forward and boil down to two things. Contract restricted usage and an aggressive catch-all licensing agreement. All liability regarding copyright, ownership, legal usage and everything else is placed entirely on the user.

Unless I'm mistaken it's quite simple and similar to other AI platforms. They provide a paid service that gives full ownership and commercial usage rights of input and output content to the user, but in using the service the user grants Suno a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable license to do almost anything they want like, selling it, sublicense, use it in promo, training data and basically anything you can think of. That license is as close to ownership as it gets without actually transferring the title, lol.

They also state that they reserve the right fully identify any use of their service in your content. So if you use this and don't disclose that you have they retain full rights to announce or confirm that you have in any context they see fit.

Clone is right, in the US 100% AI gen music can't be copyright protected so their restriction on the free plan is a legal contract, nothing to do with copyright law. And for the paid tier whether you can copyright your collaborative work with it is solely down to amount of creative input you have and the laws in your jurisdiction, nothing to do with Suno.

Also only paid plans give commercial rights, they're not granted retrospectively to stuff you've generated on the free account if you upgrade.

Again, assuming I'm sober enough to have understood that correctly, you own what you make, but suno can use anything you do on their platform however they want, and you carry all the legal risk.

 

Copyright Law

GEMA sues AI company Suno
As of: January 21, 2025, 6:41 PM

Users can generate songs with the AI application Suno. GEMA accuses the operators of using well-known works without paying the artists. It has now filed a lawsuit against the company. The music rights management company GEMA is taking action against another AI company. The company says it has filed a lawsuit against the US company Suno with the Munich I Regional Court.

It accuses Suno of having processed copyrighted recordings of world-famous songs. Suno "systematically used these recordings to train its music tool and is now exploiting them commercially without financially supporting the authors of the works." Users of the premium version of the AI tool must pay a subscription fee.

With Suno, musical pieces can be created using simple input. According to GEMA, the resulting results "largely correspond to world-famous works in terms of melody, harmony, and rhythm." Songs by Alphaville (Forever Young), Kristina Bach (Atemlos), Lou Bega (Mambo No. 5), Frank Farian (Daddy Cool), and Modern Talking (Cheri Cheri Lady) are mentioned, among others. Not only famous musicians are affected. Tobias Holzmüller, CEO of GEMA, said: "Human creativity is the foundation of all generative AI.

However, fundamental principles such as transparency, fairness, and respect are currently lacking in this market." The situation is further complicated by the fact that the results compete with works created by humans, depriving them of their commercial basis. GEMA lawsuit against OpenAI: GEMA filed a similar lawsuit last November. At the time, it was against OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

The dispute concerned song lyrics. According to its own information, GEMA represents the copyrights of around 95,000 members in Germany – composers, lyricists, and music publishers – as well as more than two million rights holders from all over the world.

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-suno-chatgpt-musik-100.html