On July 31, 2026, the Regional Court Munich I issued a landmark ruling in the first European copyright infringement case involving AI-based music generation tools. The case was brought following a lawsuit filed by GEMA (the German Association for the Collective Management of Copyright in Music) against SUNO AI (an American company that offers an AI tool for creating complete musical works).
The subject of the dispute were six musical works, including Rasputin, Daddy Cool, Forever Young, Big in Japan, Atemlos durch die Nacht and the chorus from Mambo No. 5. According to GEMA, SUNO AI used these works to train its AI tool and it reproduced recognizable elements of the works in the generated results.
The court largely accepted GEMA’s claims, finding, among other things, that the works were reproduced in the United States for the purpose of training the tool, that identifiable elements of the works were stored in the AI tool and stored on servers in Germany, and that the generated results constituted copyright infringement. The court did not accept SUNO AI’s argument that the works were used exclusively in the training process, without being stored in the tool.
The court, citing provisions of German law concerning the territorial jurisdiction of legal entities in the field of copyright law, found that it also had international jurisdiction to rule on the actions taken in the United States. With respect to the activities related to the training in the United States, the court applied US copyright law and rejected SUNO AI’s invocation of the doctrine of fair use (which allows for unauthorized use of copyrighted works in certain situations, depending on the circumstances). For the actions that took place in Germany, the court applied German copyright law.
The ruling in favor of GEMA is not yet final and can be appealed. However, it represents a significant step in the development of the legal framework for the use of copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence systems, as well as for the relationship between copyright and artificial intelligence.