Suno and Udio, the controversial AI music platforms that allow creators to generate songs from simple text prompts, have a fearsome new legal adversary.Hagens Berman has entered the explosive copyright battle over AI music generation, teaming up with Delgado Entertainment Law to represent independent artists whose recordings were allegedly copied without consent to train the two companies’ AI models.
Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 It’s a major escalation.Hagens Berman’s name comes with quite a pedigree, having represented 13 U.S.
states in what it claims is the largest litigation recovery in history.The firm in 1998 secured a historic settlement valued at $260 billion in State of Washington, et al.
v.Philip Morris, et al., the landmark tobacco case that permanently dismantled predatory cigarette marketing and fundamentally transformed American public health policy.
“Independent artists and producers represent the heart and soul of the music industry, and in the landscape of AI, they stand to lose the most,” Steve Berman, managing partner and co-founder of Hagens Berman, said in a statement.“We believe that Udio and Suno have blatantly stolen works from millions of independent artists and have violated the terms of online platforms in order to do so.” The underlying class action has its roots in lawsuits first filed in June 2025 by country musician Tony Justice and his label, 5th Wheel Records.
Justice, a full-time truck driver whose song ‘Last of the Cowboys’ has been streamed more than 8 million times on major streaming platforms, filed separate complaints against Suno in Massachusetts and Udio in New York.The suits now name Anthony Justice, 5th Wheel Records and My Heartland Publishing as plaintiffs, representing independent artists who released music on streaming services since 2021.
At the core of the complaints is a practice called stream-ripping, a method of dow...