On 31 July 2026, the Munich District Court (Landgericht München I) decided the first European copyright case against a generative AI music provider. GEMA, the German performing rights society, brought proceedings on behalf of rights holders in six protected musical compositions against Suno Inc., a US provider of a generative AI music tool. The court ruled in GEMA's favour, held Suno liable to damages, and ordered Suno to provide information to GEMA to enable quantification of those damages.
The court applied sections 15, 16, and 19a of the Urheberrechtsgesetz (UrhG) and Article 4 of Directive 2001/29/EC (InfoSoc Directive) as implemented in German law. The judgment prohibited four acts in relation to the six protected compositions: (i) reproduction for training purposes, even when training occurs on servers located in the United States; (ii) reproduction through memorisation of the works in model weights hosted on servers in Germany; (iii) communication to the public by making the model available for use; and (iv) reproduction and communication to the public of AI-generated outputs derived from the protected works.
AI music providers, general-purpose model developers training on audio corpora, and platform operators distributing generative music tools to users in Germany face direct infringement liability under this ruling for training-phase reproductions and for infringing outputs. The court held that the AI provider, not the end user, bears primary liability for infringing reproductions and outputs. The ruling that training conducted in the United States does not avoid German copyright liability closes a jurisdictional argument that US-based AI developers had advanced to limit European exposure.
The court declined to apply the text-and-data-mining exception under Article 4 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 (DSM Directive), transposed by section 44b UrhG, because Suno did not hold licences for the training corpus and did not qualify under the research exception in DSM Directive Article 3. Suno has indicated an intention to appeal to the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Court of Appeal), meaning the judgment is not final. Rights management organisations in other EU member states are expected to bring parallel proceedings against AI music providers following this ruling.
Licentium advises AI developers and content businesses on copyright risk in training data and output licensing across European jurisdictions. Contact us to discuss exposure under this ruling or related proceedings. Work we undertake includes training data copyright audit and risk assessment, licensing strategy for generative AI music and media products, DSM Directive text-and-data-mining exception analysis, collective rights management and performing rights society licensing, and cross-border AI copyright compliance.