The Munich Regional Court’s July 31, 2026 ruling against Suno is less notable for finding infringement than for how little the court needed to find it. According to Forbes’ August 5, 2026 reporting, Suno had already conceded before verdict that it trained on GEMA’s repertoire without a license and obtained the data through stream-ripping; its defense rested entirely on the claim that training itself doesn’t require one. Once Judge Elke Schwager’s chamber rejected that argument, the memorization evidence — GEMA’s lawyers reproducing ‘Rasputin’ and ‘Daddy Cool’ near note-for-note by prompting with lyrics, style, and title, as described by both RouteNote and Music Ally — became corroboration for a case the admission had already decided.
The jurisdiction problem is the real export
What travels beyond Germany is the venue theory. The court held that because Suno’s models are stored on servers in Germany and served outputs to German users, a Massachusetts company’s Massachusetts training runs are triable in Munich under Section 131 of the VGG, Germany’s collecting-societies statute — a reading Forbes flagged as the first time a European court has asserted authority over AI training conducted entirely outside its borders. If that survives appeal, every AI company with EU users inherits EU collecting-society exposure regardless of where the model was built or trained, which reframes ‘where do we train’ as a much smaller shield than AI labs have been treating it as.
The disclosure order matters more than the damages figure that hasn’t been set yet — it hands GEMA the revenue data it needs to price a license, not just win a lawsuit.
This is GEMA’s second win in nine months, following a November 2025 ruling against OpenAI over memorized lyrics that OpenAI is appealing, per Forbes. The pattern across both cases is the same: an admitted or demonstrated ‘train first, license later’ posture that collecting societies are now converting into leverage rather than just liability. Suno has said it disagrees and is weighing an appeal, and the judgment isn’t yet enforceable, according to JUVE Patent. Watch whether this pushes Suno — or Warner, Universal, and Sony, who separately sued Suno in 2024 — toward an actual licensing settlement, since a compelled disclosure of subscription revenue is exactly the pressure point that turns litigation into a negotiated rate.
“Human creativity is the foundation of all generative AI. Without humans, artificial intelligence is nothing. The court made it clear today: AI models based on the theft of intellectual property are not protected by law,” said CEO Dr Tobias Holzmüller.
