The plaintiffs say Suno trained on protected recordings and lets users generate a voice "readily identifiable" as Presley's, citing nearly fifty examples and 859 works in all. Eminem's publisher filed a parallel suit the same day.
Elvis Presley Enterprises leads a group of companies and individuals who own or control Elvis Presley's name, image, likeness and copyrights in a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence music generator Suno, filed on Friday 6 November in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Courthouse News Service and Canadian Lawyer report. The plaintiffs say Suno trained its models on copyrighted material and allows users to generate songs that mimic Presley's voice without authorisation.
The complaint pleads violations of Tennessee's Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, the ELVIS Act, which extended the state's protection against unauthorised use of a person's likeness to the voice, together with direct copyright infringement "at a scale never seen before", Tennessee's common law right of publicity, circumvention of copyright protection measures and removal or alteration of copyright management information. Against Suno's statements that it does not reprise melodies from others' songs and has never allowed prompts for specific artists, the plaintiffs filed nearly fifty recorded examples of what they say is a voice readily identifiable as Presley's. A second group, the Raleigh plaintiffs, who control the rights to hundreds of other songs including "Let's Twist Again", added three examples; the two groups count 859 infringed works in all.
The plaintiffs ask for damages, an injunction against further infringement, an order that Suno destroy unauthorised copies including those in training data sets, and a complete record of its training data. A Suno spokesperson told Courthouse News that the company exists to help people create original music, prohibits unauthorised use of an artist's work, does not allow prompts naming specific artists or songs, and screens uploaded audio and lyrics with third-party providers.
Both plaintiff groups are represented by Richard Busch, Mark Block, David Niemierzycki and Andrew Davis of Adams & Reese and by Jeffrey Faucette and Martin Glick of Skaggs Faucette, who also act for Eight Mile Style, Eminem's music publisher, in a separate suit filed against Suno the same day in the same court over training on copyrighted works and copyrighted lyrics in outputs. In late October, Elvis Presley Enterprises sued the AI developer Anthropic for direct copyright infringement.
