Suno has moved to dismiss privacy and publicity rights claims brought by musicians Jason Isbell and David Lowery. The company argues that its music outputs could not be mistaken for performances by the musicians named in the class action.
Isbell filed the case on behalf of himself and other artists, alleging that Suno lets users use prompts to extract and replicate musicians’ identities in violation of their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights.
In its motion, Suno says referring to an artist in a prompt is a common way to describe a genre or musical style and is protected by the First Amendment. It argues that such a reference does not, by itself, infringe copyright or create confusion about who performed a piece of music. Suno also contends that U.S. copyright law does not protect general musical styles or genres, and that applying state publicity rights laws to them would conflict with federal law.
Suno’s platform blocks direct artist-name prompts by converting them into descriptive style tags. For example, “Pantera” might become “aggressive metal.” Isbell and Lowery allege that users can bypass that system to generate music that imitates a particular artist’s style.
