On Friday (July 31), the Munich Regional Court issued a ruling that the global AI music industry has been bracing for since January 2025: Suno lost. Judge Elke Schwager sided with German collecting society GEMA on virtually all counts, finding that Suno was not entitled to process music from GEMA’s repertoire without a license or payment, that storing protected songs in its model violated German reproduction rights, and that outputs generated from those songs violated the making-available right. The Munich Regional Court ruled that Suno is in breach of German and US copyright law by training its AI systems on songs from GEMA’s repertoire and storing and reproducing them, requiring AI companies to pay to license material for the systematic use of GEMA’s repertoire and its commercial exploitation. The court ordered Suno to disclose revenue linked to the infringement and declared it liable for damages, with the specific amount to be determined in a subsequent proceeding. The ruling is a first-instance decision and can be appealed, but its immediate effect is clear: for the first time anywhere in the world, a court has found that a generative AI music company must license the catalogs it learns from.
The case centered on six specific musical works, including Boney M.’s “Rasputin,” Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5,” and Boney M.’s “Daddy Cool.” At a March hearing, GEMA presented evidence that Suno’s AI-generated outputs matched the original compositions in melody, harmony, and rhythm after being prompted with song titles or artist names, demonstrating what the society called “memorization” of protected works rather than mere stylistic inspiration. That distinction is legally significant: GEMA argued, and the court agreed, that Suno’s models did not simply learn general musical patterns but stored and reproduced the underlying protected works in a way that required a license. As Variety reported, the ruling covers both model training and output generation, addressing the full chain of AI music creation rather than only one dimension of it.
GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller described the decision in sweeping terms. “This is a verdict of global significance,” he told Reuters, adding that the ruling establishes that AI companies must license music catalogs “for the systematic use of GEMA’s repertoire and its commercial exploitation.” The German government’s culture representative, Wolfram Weimer, called the verdict “an important signal to support creators’ rights in the digital music industry,” while calling for a regulatory framework that “strengthens innovation and creativity.” GEMA, which represents 95,000 members in Germany including composers, lyricists, and music publishers, as well as over two million rights holders worldwide, filed the lawsuit in January 2025 after Holzmüller declared that the generative AI market had “so far lacked basic principles such as transparency, fairness and respect.”
Suno rejected the ruling directly. “We disagree with today’s ruling, which rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of how Suno’s technology works, how it is used and how US law applies, and are evaluating all available options, including an appeal,” the company said in a statement. The reference to US law is telling: Suno’s central defense in its pending Massachusetts fair use case against UMG and Sony has been that AI training on copyrighted music is a transformative fair use under US copyright law. German copyright law does not contain an equivalent fair use doctrine, which is part of why GEMA chose Munich as the jurisdiction for its case. The Munich court’s ruling does not bind any US court, but as Billboard noted, it is the first major legal blow to an AI music company anywhere in the world and will be cited in every subsequent AI copyright proceeding internationally.
