Suno Says Jason Isbell Lawsuit Over Artist ‘Identities’ Must Be Dismissed: ‘Nothing Unlawful About That’

Suno is asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit claiming the AI music firm stole the artistic identities of Jason Isbell and other stars, arguing there’s “nothing unlawful” about seeking to replicate the “vibe” of a particular artist.

Isbell sued in August, accusing Suno of allowing users to “conjure up a beloved musician’s identity” by entering their name as a prompt in its AI song generator. It was a novel case centered on an artist’s likeness rights, unlike earlier litigation against AI labs over the use of copyrighted music to train models.

But in Suno’s first major response on Tuesday (Nov. 3), its lawyers say there is “nothing unlawful” about merely using an artist’s name to describe music, any more than it’s illegal for a human artist to say “let’s go for something here with more of a Jason Isbell vibe.”

“When people describe styles of music, they often use artists’ names as shorthand for the genre they perform in,” Suno’s lawyers write in a motion obtained and first reported by Billboard. “This case turns on the premise that the law somehow condemns that universal practice. In reality it does not; the First Amendment would not allow it to.”

Suno’s motion, which asks the judge to dismiss the case immediately, argues that Isbell’s lawsuit attacks “ubiquitous methods of communicating ideas” and would hurt the “creative and cultural ecosystem” if allowed to proceed.

An attorney for Isbell did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

Isbell and other artists sued in August, accusing Suno of violating artists’ likeness rights (also known as publicity rights) by encoding their entire musical personas as tokens in its AI model. The case was filed as a class action, seeking to potentially represent “millions” of other artists: “The platform is built to identify musicians by name and generate identity-evocative output on command. This is its product.”

Suno was already facing a slew of lawsuits from major music companies, who claim the company violated their federal copyrights by ingesting millions of songs to train their models. The new case was different, accusing Suno of breaching state laws in New York, California, Tennessee and elsewhere that protect a person’s name, image and likeness from commercial exploitation.

Suno says it doesn’t actually allow users to prompt its AI model with specific artist names. When users do enter artist names, the platform says it translates that request into “descriptive musical characteristics,” which can then be used to direct the model to generate a song. A prompt of “Duran Duran,” for example, might get redirected into one of “New wave, Synth-pop, Pop rock.”

Isbell’s lawsuit claims those safeguards are faulty and can be duped by merely using spaces, such as Taylor Swift with “t a y l o r s w i f t” or Bad Bunny with “b a d b u n n y.” Even when a name is translated into musical styles, Isbell says the model clearly still exploits an artist’s identity: “Suno built and trained a model to index musicians by name. It encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent.”

But in Tuesday’s response, Suno says those accusations are legally deeply flawed. Simply using the name of a real person as a “shorthand to convey information about the genre that they want to create in,” Suno’s attorneys argue, is not the kind of thing that has historically violated state-law likeness rights.

“The law does not prevent people from using names to find or describe information, nor does it prevent building a tool capable of recognizing those references and acting on the information they supply,” Suno’s lawyers write, arguing that a ruling to the contrary would violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.

Even if likeness rights worked that way, Suno says the case would still be doomed by federal “preemption,” a legal doctrine that bars state-level claims that interfere with existing federal laws. Allowing artists to sue to assert their state-level likeness rights in such a way, Suno says, would overlap too much with federal copyright law’s existing protections for creative works.

“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,” Suno says. “[This lawsuit] would create a shadow state law IP regime … fundamentally conflicting with the federal regime that has been in place for more than two centuries.”