On July 31, 2026, the Regional Court of Munich I handed down its decision in the dispute between German collecting society GEMA and Suno AI, the US provider of an AI tool that generates complete, playable songs from simple text prompts. The 42nd Civil Chamber, which specializes in copyright law, ruled under presiding judge Elke Schwager in favor of GEMA (case ID: 42 O 763/25). Coverage and analysis of the decision — the first European court ruling on generative music AI — continued through the week of August 3.

GEMA brought the action in January 2025, asserting claims on behalf of the composers of six well-known musical works: 'Forever Young' and 'Big in Japan' (Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Frank Mertens), 'Mambo No. 5' (David Lubega and Christian Pletschacher), 'Daddy Cool' (Frank Farian), 'Rasputin' (Frank Farian, Fred Jay and George Reyam) and 'Atemlos' (Kristina Bach). It was undisputed that Suno's model was trained using the six works; according to the court, Suno used 'stream-ripping' techniques to extract the works from YouTube, circumventing the platform's 'rolling cipher' technical protection measure.

The court ordered Suno to cease the unauthorized reproduction of the protected works and to stop using them to train the AI model, to disclose information on revenue generated in connection with the infringements, and to pay damages in an amount yet to be determined. Central to the ruling is the finding of 'memorisation': the works were effectively stored within the AI models, hosted on servers in Germany, and the similarities between the originals and AI-generated outputs were too extensive and specific to be coincidental. The court also held Suno — not its users — responsible for infringing outputs, and found that merely making the model available to the public infringes the right of communication to the public under German law.

The court rejected Suno's defenses. It found the text-and-data-mining exception inapplicable because the works were not merely analyzed but retained in reproducible form. For copying during training in the United States, the court applied US copyright law and held the fair use doctrine did not protect Suno, distinguishing the Bartz and Kadrey decisions — where training was found to be fair use largely because outputs did not reproduce the originals — since here simple prompts yielded outputs substantially similar to the protected works. German courts had jurisdiction over the US-based training acts under a special venue rule in Germany's Collecting Societies Act.

The judgment is not yet enforceable, and Suno has said it will explore all options including an appeal. The case is GEMA's second AI victory in Munich after its November 2025 win against OpenAI over song lyrics. GEMA, which represents around 103,000 members, says it seeks partnership-based solutions with AI companies; Suno entered a licensing partnership with Warner Music at the end of 2025. GEMA was represented by Raue (Robert Heine leading), and Suno by Latham & Watkins (Anne Loehner leading).

Original Link: https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/munich-regional-court-stops-suno-using-gema-protected-music/