Elvis Presley Enterprises sued Suno in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday (November 6), alongside a group of song owners.
MBW reported the headline terms this week, including pleaded figures that come to just over USD $202 million before any tripling or punitive damages.
The suit, which you can read in full here, brings five claims. Two rely on Tennessee law: one under the state’s ELVIS Act, the other under its common-law right of publicity. The remaining three are federal claims for copyright infringement, for circumventing access controls on streaming and lyrics platforms, and for stripping songwriter and publisher credits from the songs.
“Suno is the embodiment of why the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security) was so essentially required,” the Presley complaint states.
That first claim is an early test of whether the law can reach a company such as Suno, which builds an AI music generator, and not just the people who use it. Here are five things to know.
1. The ELVIS Act targets tools built to produce a particular person’s voice
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act into law on March 21, 2024. It took effect on July 1.
The law added voice to Tennessee’s existing right-of-publicity statute, which already protected a person’s name, photograph, and likeness. It defines a voice as a sound that is “readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual,” whether it is the real voice or a simulation.
Under the Act, anyone who publishes or otherwise makes a person’s voice or likeness available to the public, knowing the use was not authorized, can be sued.
A separate provision is aimed at the technology itself. It covers anyone who makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology whose “primary purpose or function” is producing a particular, identifiable person’s voice or likeness, if they know the use was not authorized. Elvis Presley Enterprises is suing under that provision too.
The statute doesn’t define “primary purpose or function,” leaving it to a court to decide whether that covers a music generator such as Suno.
2. The complaint goes straight at Suno’s defense in the Jason Isbell case
On November 3, three days before the Presley suit was filed, Suno asked US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston to dismiss a proposed class action brought by Jason Isbell and three other musicians. That case also includes a Tennessee claim.
Suno’s argument there is that when a user types an artist’s name into a prompt, “that is at most a use of the artist’s name by the user – not by Suno.” It also told the court that “secondary liability for a right of publicity claim is not a recognized concept in the law.”
The Presley complaint aims squarely at the company: “Plaintiff’s claims are for Suno’s own conduct, not any act by a user.” Isbell’s complaint made the same point, though, and Suno’s motion argues against it.
The two sides also disagree on what Suno is for. “Suno’s purpose is to create new music, not to replicate specific creative expression that already exists, such as a particular melody, a sample of someone else’s recording, or the identifiable sound of an actual person’s voice,” Suno’s motion says.
Elvis Presley Enterprises alleges the opposite: “The primary purpose of Suno’s technology and tools is to produce particular identifiable individual’s voices for such distribution and availability to the public.”
Then there’s the question of whether a listener would recognize the voice. Suno argues that Isbell’s Tennessee claim fails because he hasn’t alleged any Suno output with a voice “readily identifiable” as his, language taken from the ELVIS Act’s definition of a voice. The Presley complaint quotes that argument back and says its examples are exactly that kind of output.
But it also repeats, word for word, a line from the Isbell complaint that Suno leaned on in its motion: that Suno deploys musicians’ identities by name “even where the quality of Suno’s outputs falls short of the true talent it evokes.”
Suno has also argued that the musicians’ claims are preempted by the federal Copyright Act, and that their theory would be barred by the First Amendment. The Presley complaint gets ahead of the preemption point, saying Presley’s voice and identity are “not within the subject matter of copyright.” It cites Midler v. Ford Motor Co., the 1988 Ninth Circuit ruling over a Ford ad that used a sound-alike to imitate Bette Midler.
3. The allegations focus on Suno’s product features, not just prompts
The complaint’s case goes beyond what users type. It alleges that Suno’s system treats Presley’s name as “a retrieval key for a set of performer-specific representations,” and that Suno Pro subscribers can save a “voice” and reuse it to generate new tracks.
One output it cites, Zeon of Mine, says it was “Made from” what appears to be a saved voice titled “Elvis.” Another, Elvis in The Jailhouse Rock, had more than 125,000 plays and was still live on Suno when the complaint was written, according to the filing.
The filing also says Suno’s own “For You” recommendations served up two tracks that use Presley’s voice.
One example doesn’t involve a name prompt at all. As recently as October 7, the complaint says, Suno generated two tracks titled He Is Still The King from lyrics alone, which spelled out Presley’s name with spaces between the letters. Each, it alleges, “contained a copy of Elvis’ unmistakable and iconic voice.”
Suno’s motion in Boston described prompts that spell out an artist’s name letter by letter as “atypical requests.”
4. A California court may have to apply Tennessee law and weigh Presley’s Army service
The suit was filed in California, but Elvis Presley Enterprises argues that Tennessee law should govern because Presley was domiciled there when he died at Graceland in 1977. Under California’s conflict-of-laws test, it says, Tennessee has the “greatest governmental interest” in his likeness rights.
The complaint says unauthorized uses of Presley’s likeness after his death helped prompt the state’s Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984, which made Tennessee “one of the first states to legislatively recognize posthumous publicity rights by statute.” It also says officials at the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, which presents the Grammy Awards, sought the blessing of Presley’s rightsholders before the 2024 bill was named after him.
On the ELVIS Act claim, Elvis Presley Enterprises puts its actual damages and Suno’s profits at an amount “believed to exceed $50 million.” It also wants triple damages and attorney fees, which the Act allows only when the rights of a “member of the armed forces” are knowingly infringed.
That’s where Presley’s Army service comes in. Elvis Presley Enterprises argues he qualifies because he served in the US Army from 1958 to 1960, and the statute’s definition covers a service member who “is in, or was called into, active service.” It doesn’t say whether that extends to a veteran who left active duty 17 years before his death.
5. Elvis Presley Enterprises wants more than money
Beyond damages, the ELVIS Act lets a court issue injunctions and “authorize the confiscation of all unauthorized items and seize all instrumentalities used in connection with the violation.”
Elvis Presley Enterprises is asking for that, as well as the impoundment and destruction of materials used to violate its rights in Presley’s likeness.
The statute also covers the “plates, molds, matrices, masters, tapes, film negatives, or other articles” that can be used to reproduce those materials. The complaint adds “memory chips and drives” to the list.
On the copyright side, the plaintiffs want Suno to hand over all unauthorized copies of their songs for impoundment or destruction, “including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure.”
Elvis Presley Enterprises also argues the harm is ongoing. “Each new model version, product release, and generated output that imitates Presley’s voice is a separate and independent appropriation of his identity,” the complaint states.
What happens next
The case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero on November 9, according to the court docket. Suno has not yet responded.
In Boston, the Isbell plaintiffs have until December 1 to respond to Suno’s motion.
A Suno spokesperson told The Verge: “Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone’s name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist’s work.
“To protect against this, we do not allow prompts for specific artists’ names and songs and work with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio files and lyrics for potential misuse. We are always working to strengthen our guardrails and we will continue to add new safeguards that protect artists and our users.”
Suno’s court filings add some detail. In its October 20 answer to the second lawsuit brought against it by UMG and Sony, it admitted that “as of January 2026, users may include artist names in their prompts,” while denying that those prompts generate outputs “without first converting the artist name to a style description.”
Its Isbell motion says that when a user types an artist’s name into a prompt, “that name is replaced with a description of the genre the model can understand” before it reaches the model.
None of the allegations in the Presley complaint has been tested in court.
