GEMA is the clear winner here, and every AI music company that skipped licensing negotiations is the one facing the bill. The Munich Regional Court’s 42nd Civil Chamber found that Suno infringed German copyrights not just by training on unlicensed recordings pulled via stream-ripping from YouTube, according to JUVE Patent, but by “memorizing” and reproducing them in outputs generated in Germany. That’s a second straight loss for a US AI company in the same courtroom — GEMA beat OpenAI there in November 2025 — and it establishes a pattern German judges are comfortable applying to generative AI broadly.
The buyer-seller map is getting redrawn in real time. On one side sit collecting societies — GEMA with roughly 100,000 German members and two million rightsholders worldwide, plus Denmark’s Koda, which has its own pending Suno claim — now positioned as mandatory licensing counterparties rather than optional ones. On the other side sit AI music platforms that must decide whether to negotiate or litigate. Warner Music Group already picked negotiation, settling with Suno last November in a deal that included acquiring WMG’s Songkick platform, and Udio has cut similar terms with WMG and Universal. Sony Music and UMG, by contrast, remain in active US discovery against Suno, betting that American fair-use doctrine will treat sound-recording training more favorably than a Munich court treated composition training.
Why the venue matters
The competitive wrinkle is jurisdictional reach: the court asserted authority over training conduct that happened in the US, relying on Germany’s Collecting Societies Act to give GEMA a privileged venue, and found Suno liable under both German and US copyright frameworks. That’s a template other European PROs can copy, and it means an AI company’s US legal strategy no longer insulates it from European exposure if its models are hosted or its outputs reach users there.
Licensing deals like Warner’s are starting to look less like generosity and more like risk management.
For data and AI-training markets more broadly, the ruling reinforces a widening gap between companies buying rights upfront and those defending ingestion after the fact. Damages haven’t been set and Suno says it will appeal, so the financial exposure is still unknown — but the injunctive piece, ordering Suno to stop training on and reproducing GEMA’s repertoire, bites immediately if it survives appeal. Watch whether Sony and UMG’s still-pending US case against Suno, or Koda’s Danish claim, cite Munich’s reasoning, and whether other European societies file next.
"Today, the Chamber made one thing crystal clear: AI models built on stolen intellectual property have no protection under the law. AI service providers must pay for licenses rather than helping themselves to our members' works free of charge," a statement from GEMA's CEO, Dr Tobias Holzmüller, reads.
