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Munich court rules Suno infringed six German hits by memorizing them in its models and reproducing them in outputs, and holds its U.S. training was not fair use

The Munich Regional Court I's copyright chamber, in a judgment announced July 31, 2026, largely upheld the German collecting society GEMA's claims for an injunction, information and damages against Suno over six musical works, among them Atemlos durch die Nacht, Rasputin, Big in Japan, Forever Young and Daddy Cool (lyrics were not at issue). Per the court's press release, GEMA generated the outputs by entering each song's lyrics, a style and the title, with no melody or rhythm specified. The court found the works were reproducibly contained in Suno's v3.5 and v4 models, stored on servers in Germany; that this memorization infringed the reproduction right under Section 16 UrhG and was not covered by the text-and-data-mining exception in Section 44b UrhG; that the outputs reproduced and publicly communicated the works; and that Suno, not its users, was responsible because it chose the training data and built the models. Applying U.S. law to the training copies made in the U.S., it held them not fair use, distinguishing Bartz and Kadrey because here the outputs closely resembled the originals. The court said the audio was stream-ripped from YouTube. The judgment is not final.