Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have formally added a claim to their copyright lawsuit against Suno accusing the AI music company of circumventing YouTube’s anti-downloading technology.
The amended complaint – which you can read here – was filed on Tuesday (August 25) in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
It follows an August 18 order in which Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted the labels leave to bring the claim, under Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
However, in a second August 18 order, Saylor denied the labels’ separate bid to add 61,026 recordings to the 560 already in suit.
The labels first moved to add the stream-ripping claim in September 2025, weeks after Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit over its downloading of pirated books.
Suno asked the court to throw the claim out in October 2025, arguing that the practice is not prohibited by the DMCA.
Its lawyers argued that the statute bars circumventing controls on access to a copyrighted work, not controls on copying it, and that YouTube videos are freely accessible to anyone.
The amended complaint alleges that Suno obtained recordings by bypassing YouTube’s “rolling cipher,” an encryption measure that the labels say conceals the URL of the underlying media file.
Suno “acquired many (if not all) of the copyrighted sound recordings in its training data by illicitly downloading them from YouTube using a notorious method of music piracy known as ‘stream ripping,’” the complaint states.
The filing names the tools YT-DL and YT-DLP, which it says Suno used “to circumvent YouTube’s encryption and scrape copyrighted recordings from YouTube.”
The footnote supporting that allegation cites Suno’s own supplemental responses to the labels’ interrogatories.
The labels also say they are not currently alleging that Suno’s outputs are themselves infringing, unless discovery shows that they “directly or indirectly recapture portions of the Copyrighted Recordings.”
According to Saylor’s order, Suno told the labels in May 2025 that it had downloaded audio files from YouTube, and that it had used open-source software tools such as YT-DL and YT-DLP to do so.
Saylor wrote: “The ultimate determination of whether Suno circumvented a technological measure that effectively controls access to plaintiffs’ sound recordings will require a developed factual record on how the technological measure and circumvention tools work.
“At this stage, however, the complaint alleges a plausible claim for violation of § 1201(a)(1), and the Court will grant plaintiffs’ motion for leave to amend.”
The judge added that it was not yet clear how the two tools operate, and that they might reach the content through authorized means or bypass YouTube’s measure altogether.
Saylor was less receptive to the labels’ second motion, which sought to add 61,026 recordings identified through audio-fingerprinting service Audible Magic.
Denying that motion, Saylor wrote: “Plaintiffs are of course entitled to pursue valid claims for copyright infringement, and the magnitude of the alleged infringement is not a defense.
“Nonetheless, simply adding claims involving 61,026 additional works to this lawsuit will have obvious consequences of complexity and delay.”
The judge wrote that summary judgment on Suno’s fair use defense “will likely resolve the predominant issue in this case,” and that the company “is entitled to a timely resolution of that question.”
In other words, Saylor wants to get on with deciding the core component of this case – whether Suno’s use of copyrights was fair use or not – and doesn’t want to get delayed by tens of thousands of new recordings entering the docket.
Saylor noted that the labels could assert the additional works in a separate lawsuit, which would likely be assigned to his own session.
The 61,026 works would have carried a theoretical maximum of more than $9 billion in statutory damages, against around $84 million under the 560-work complaint, as previously reported by MBW.
The amended complaint seeks up to $150,000 per work infringed, plus up to $2,500 for each act of circumvention.
It also carries figures that predate Suno’s recent fundraising, describing a $125 million round that valued the company at approximately $500 million.
Suno raised more than $400 million in June 2026 at a $5.4 billion post-money valuation.
Fact discovery in the majors’ case closes on September 30, according to the judge’s order, with both sides expected to move for summary judgment on whether training an AI model on copyrighted recordings without a license is fair use.
Two days after granting leave in the majors’ case, Saylor cited that ruling to keep an equivalent stream-ripping claim alive in a proposed class action brought against Suno by country artist Tony Justice.Music Business Worldwide