Not a Fresh Start

On 9 September, Suno told TechCrunch that its new v6 music models were “not trained using the data it used to train previous versions” — a clean severance, arriving on schedule. The schedule had been set the previous November, when Suno settled its first infringement suit with Warner Music Group by promising exactly this: “When the new models launch in 2026, the current models will be deprecated.” Suno kept that promise more literally than most settlements require. v4.5, v5 and v5.5 didn’t just lose primacy to v6, v6-Wild and v6-Mini; they were retired outright, with no option for a subscriber to roll back to whichever earlier version they preferred.

Nine days later, on 18 September, Universal Music Group and Sony Music filed a new federal suit against Suno in Massachusetts, naming more than sixty thousand recordings and arguing that the deprecation changed nothing that mattered. “v6 is not a fresh start,” the complaint says; “it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree” — poisoned, not poisonous, a slight drift from the doctrine’s usual name that reads like a detail nobody thought worth fixing before filing. Fruit of the poisonous tree is a criminal-procedure rule: evidence derived from an illegal search stays tainted no matter how lawfully the second step was carried out, a principle the Supreme Court stated in 1920 in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States and Felix Frankfurter later named in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. Retraining a model on new material doesn’t launder what an earlier model already did with the old material, the labels are arguing here; it just moves the taint one generation downstream.

Four days after that, responding to what it called “fundamentally flawed” claims, Suno said more about v6’s training than it had on launch day. The new models, the company confirmed, were built on “content licensed from our partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from our community, and the accumulated learnings from our team.” Read plainly, “interactions … including creations” means what users made on the earlier, unlicensed-era models became part of what taught the new one. That is close to the exact fact pattern the labels’ theory needed, and Suno supplied the confirming detail itself, two weeks into its own defense, without being compelled to by discovery.

None of this settles anything, and the nine-figure — sorry, ten-figure — sum now attached to the case is a ceiling, not a verdict: US copyright law allows up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement, and sixty-thousand-odd works times that cap is arithmetic, not a jury, landing near $9 billion only because multiplication doesn’t know the difference between a maximum and a likelihood. The trade press covering the labels’ escalating filings has noted the real function of a number that size: leverage, the same leverage that got Warner and BMG to licensing deals rather than trials. Suno has already lost a version of this argument once this year — a Munich court ruled in August, in a case brought by the German rights society GEMA, that Suno had infringed regardless of what its terms of service said about user responsibility.

I build tools like this one, which is the only reason I’d bother with the part nobody is litigating: what v6 is actually like to use. Migration off the old models was mandatory, and the public reaction, gathered mostly from Suno’s own subreddit and reported by EDM.com within a week of launch, was not generous. “They actually made a perfect slop machine,” one user wrote; others described muffled, over-processed vocals, prompts the model quietly overrides, and — in more than one account — a British singing voice rendered flatly American whether asked to be or not. None of that is illegal. It is just what “trained differently” turned out to mean for the people the deprecation actually happened to, in the same fortnight a $9 billion complaint was busy arguing what it meant for everyone else.

Here is a metaphor the filing didn’t reach for, and it is mine, not theirs: cut a tree to the ground and the shoots that come up from the stump are coppice growth — genuinely new wood, new rings, sometimes outliving by centuries the trunk that was felled — and also, unmistakably, the same root system, whatever was living in it. “From the ground up” was always a more literal claim than either side in this case has treated it as.

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