On 31 July 2026, the Landgericht München I delivered judgment in GEMA v. Suno Inc., Case No. 42 O 763/25, the first European court ruling on copyright liability for a generative AI music tool. The case was brought by GEMA, the German music collecting society, against Suno Inc., the US-based provider of an AI music generation platform. The judgment is at the enforcement stage; Suno may appeal to the Oberlandesgericht München.
The court prohibited four acts with respect to six GEMA-administered compositions: reproduction for training purposes in the United States, retention of those works within the AI model in Germany, communication to the public by making the trained model available online, and reproduction and communication to the public through AI-generated output tracks. The court applied the Urheberrechtsgesetz (§§ 16, 19a UrhG) to acts occurring in Germany. It assumed jurisdiction over the US training acts through a venue rule available to collecting societies under German civil procedure law, then applied US copyright law and rejected Suno's fair use defence under 17 U.S.C. § 107, finding the training use commercial and substitutive. The court also ordered Suno to disclose the scale of its use of GEMA-administered works and found it liable in damages.
The ruling creates liability exposure for AI music generation companies that train models on recordings administered by territorial collecting societies in EU Member States without securing prior licences. GEMA covers Germany; other collecting societies with comparable membership coverage include PRS for Music in the UK, SACEM in France, SIAE in Italy, and SGAE in Spain, each of which is positioned to bring parallel proceedings in its territory. Music platforms, app developers integrating AI music generation tools, and enterprise customers deploying unlicensed AI music services carry secondary exposure under the laws of each territory where they make those services available.
The court's assumption of jurisdiction over US training acts rests on a collecting-society-specific procedural rule; private rightholders cannot use the same route. GEMA v. OpenAI, a related proceeding addressing AI training on GEMA works, is pending before the Oberlandesgericht München. The Court of Justice of the European Union is expected to rule in September 2026 in the Like Company case, which may alter the copyright analysis applicable to text-and-data-mining exceptions under Article 4 of Directive (EU) 2019/790.
Licentium advises AI developers and digital content distributors on copyright exposure across European jurisdictions. Work we undertake includes copyright clearance strategy for AI training datasets, collecting society licence negotiations, cross-border copyright risk assessments, and support in AI copyright disputes before EU courts.