Munich court rules Suno infringed GEMA copyright, orders revenue disclosure

The Munich Regional Court ruled on July 31 that AI music generator Suno infringed copyright by training on and reproducing songs from the repertoire of GEMA, Germany’s music-rights collecting society. The court granted injunctive relief and ordered Suno to disclose revenue tied to the infringing use so damages can be calculated.

For GEMA, which represents more than 100,000 members and roughly 2 million rights holders worldwide, it is a second courtroom win against an AI company, the society said, after a November 2025 ruling against OpenAI. The decisions give European rights holders a template for suing generative-AI firms over training data.

The 42nd civil chamber, under presiding judge Elke Schwager, found that Suno’s v3.5 and v4 models could reproduce near-complete copies of songs including ‘Rasputin,’ ‘Daddy Cool,’ ‘Mambo No. 5,’ ‘Forever Young’ and ‘Atemlos’ when prompted with title and lyric cues, and that the models were stored on servers in Germany.

‘AI models based on the theft of intellectual property are not protected by law,’ GEMA chief executive Tobias Holzmüller said. Suno said it ‘disagree[s] with today’s ruling’ and is ‘evaluating all available options, including an appeal.’ The company has argued in the United States that training on copyrighted recordings is fair use, a defense with no direct equivalent under German and EU law.

The damages figure remains open: the court ordered disclosure first, and the amount will be set later. An appeal to the Higher Regional Court could take months and would test how German judges treat the EU’s text-and-data-mining exception, which lets rights holders opt out of AI training. For now, the ruling signals that reproducing recognizable songs — not merely ingesting them — is the legal exposure generative-music companies face in Europe.