Judge Lets Indie Artists' AI Copyright Case Against Suno Move to Discovery
A federal judge has refused to throw out most of a proposed class-action copyright lawsuit against AI music company Suno, clearing the way for independent artists to press their claims through discovery.
US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the District of Massachusetts issued the order on August 20, denying Suno's motion to dismiss on two of the three counts the company challenged. The ruling was reported on August 27 by Music Business Worldwide.
The lead plaintiff is Tony Justice, an independent country musician who also works as a truck driver. He filed the suit — docketed as Justice v. Suno, Inc., case number 1:25-cv-11739 — on behalf of independent recording artists and artist-owned entities that hold copyrights to song compositions and recordings. The plaintiffs accuse Suno of downloading their songs from YouTube, copying them to train its AI model, and generating music that reproduces protected elements of their work.
Suno moved to dismiss three of the case's four counts under Rule 12(b)(6), a procedural rule that lets a defendant argue the complaint fails to state a claim even if its facts are true. Count 1, a direct reproduction claim under Section 106(1) of the US Copyright Act, went unchallenged and proceeds regardless.
The first count Suno tried to strike — Count 2 — covers derivative works, the category of creations that adapt or transform existing copyrighted material. Suno argued the plaintiffs had not produced a specific AI output that infringes their own songs. The amended complaint does supply roughly 100 examples of Suno outputs that replicate or resemble songs owned by other copyright holders, but none tied directly to the plaintiffs' catalogues.
Judge Saylor was unpersuaded. He wrote that there is no categorical requirement for a plaintiff to produce the derivative work at the motion-to-dismiss stage, and found it a "plausible inference" that Suno's model has created outputs substantially similar to the plaintiffs' works — leaving proof of such outputs for discovery.
Suno also argued the plaintiffs could use Suno's publicly available tool to hunt for infringing outputs themselves. Saylor rejected that logic, writing that whether plaintiffs can now generate infringing outputs is separate from whether Suno has ever done so.
The second surviving count — Count 3 — involves Section 1201(a)(1) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work. The plaintiffs allege YouTube uses a rolling cipher — a constantly changing code — to impede external access to its videos, and that Suno used a stream-ripping tool to get around it. Suno and the rival AI company Udio have both argued in separate proceedings that stream-ripping circumvents copy controls rather than access controls, a distinction the DMCA treats differently.
The only count dropped was a claim under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act, which the plaintiffs told the court they had cited by mistake. Judge Hellerstein of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York had separately declined to reinstate a related consumer-protection claim by Justice earlier in August.
Saylor pointed to his own ruling two days earlier in a parallel case brought by the major labels — including UMG — against Suno before the same court. Suno had described the independent artists' suit as a "tag-along" to that major-label litigation, according to Law360. The label of convenience did not save its motion.
What makes the ruling matter beyond this case is the discovery it unlocks. The plaintiffs will now be able to demand internal Suno documents about how its model was trained, what data it ingested, and what outputs it has generated. The complaint alleges Suno intentionally structured its model to mirror the songs it trained on, and points to remarks by Suno's CEO that the model can already produce outputs replicating real artists' vocals and songs.
For independent artists without major-label resources, the ruling keeps open a legal path that large publishers have been pursuing separately. The case now moves into the evidence-gathering phase, where the factual questions Saylor deferred — which songs Suno copied, what its model produced, and whether those outputs infringe — will be tested against documents rather than pleadings.
