US Music Industry Intervenes in OpenAI Copyright Lawsuit Over Fair Use Defence

A coalition of prominent US music industry bodies, including RIAA, NMPA, A2IM, SONA, and ARA, has submitted an amicus brief in the ongoing federal copyright litigation against OpenAI brought by authors and newspapers. While the lawsuit involves text, the music sector intervened because all US AI copyright battles—including pending actions against Suno, Udio, and Anthropic—depend on whether AI training qualifies as fair use.

The brief outlines three main arguments: training AI to generate competing outputs lacks transformativeness under recent US Supreme Court precedent; AI-generated works dilute the market value of original human creations; and unlicensed copying undermines copyright's constitutional purpose of encouraging human creativity. Separately, the Music Artist Coalition joined an amicus brief emphasizing that existing collective management and licensing networks already enable cost-effective rights clearance at scale, refuting claims that licensing training data is impractical.