According to The Verge, Sony Music and Universal Music Group filed yet another suit against Suno, accusing its new v6 model of "model laundering" after training on user outputs from older models built on unlicensed music.
The marketing, first. Suno sold v6 as a clean slate. New training pipeline, licensed content, signed partners, a fresh start. The launch copy is exactly what a company writes after reading the labels' lawyers' memo about the last model. The product announcement is a compliance document with a changelog.
The labels read the fine print. v6 did not train on clean data. It trained on the outputs of the old models, on user creations fed to the old models, on the accumulated learnings of a machine that built itself ripping audio off YouTube. The complaint names 60,202 recordings and asks for up to 150,000 dollars per work. The labels call it model laundering. You take stolen music, run it through a machine, and get back a product that looks clean. The complaint says v6 "is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree."
The tasty irony. Suno now runs two tracks at once: a licensed product built with Warner, BMG and Believe, and a live lawsuit from the two companies that refused to sign. Suno says the new data does not include the Universal or Sony catalogue. The labels say a laundered shirt is still a shirt, per Startup Fortune. The clean-slate marketing is now an exhibit in the very lawsuit it was supposed to avoid.
YOUR TURN: If a model trained on stolen songs can launder them into a licensed product, what exactly did the license buy?
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