Added to our archive on 1 October 2026. This report is dated to the day of the event.

Six songs decided the case: "Atemlos durch die Nacht", "Rasputin", "Big in Japan", "Forever Young", "Daddy Cool" and the refrain of "Mambo No. 5". On 31 July 2026 the Munich Regional Court I ruled that Suno, the AI music generator, had copied all six without permission, kept them inside its models and played them back to users. It largely granted the claims of GEMA, the German music rights society, for an injunction, information on revenue and damages.

Legal commentators called the decision Europe's first AI music copyright ruling, and it is GEMA's second win over a generative AI company in under a year, after a Munich judgment against OpenAI over song lyrics in November 2025. This one reaches further. The court judged the training Suno carried out in the United States under US copyright law and found infringement there too, so an AI company serving listeners in Germany cannot assume that training abroad keeps it out of a German court's reach.

  • Ruling: Munich Regional Court I, 42nd Civil Chamber, case 42 O 763/25, 31 July 2026; not final.
  • Finding: Six songs were memorised in Suno's model versions v3.5 and v4, and Germany's text and data mining exception did not cover it.
  • Why it matters: The court held that a music model which memorises songs infringes copyright without a licence, and it also ruled on training done in the US.

What the court found

According to the court's press release, Suno obtained the songs from YouTube by stream ripping, getting around a technical protection measure YouTube calls "Rolling Cipher", and used them as training data. The chamber, presided over by Judge Elke Schwager, found that the works could be reproduced from Suno's model versions v3.5 and v4, which were stored on servers in Germany. In the court's definition, memorisation exists when a model does not merely extract information from its training data, but the content of that data can itself be found in the parameters fixed after training.

That memorisation is a reproduction under German copyright law, the court said, and it is not covered by the text and data mining exception in section 44b of the German Copyright Act, which permits automated analysis of works. The chamber went a step further: simply offering the model and the app for generating music already infringed the right of communication to the public.

The outputs failed as well. GEMA's prompts gave only a title, a musical style and lyrics, with no melody, harmony or rhythm, and the original elements of the songs were still recognisable in what came out. Because the prompts were so open, the court held Suno, not its users, responsible for the results. Music Business Worldwide reported that GEMA had shown at a hearing in March that the generated tracks matched the compositions in melody, harmony and rhythm.

Training in America, liability in Munich

The cross border part of the ruling rests on section 131 of Germany's Collecting Societies Act, a provision open to rights societies such as GEMA, which the court used to take jurisdiction over acts committed in the United States. Applying the law of the country where protection is claimed, it judged Suno's American copying under American law and rejected the fair use defence: every factor the US Supreme Court set out in its Warhol decision weighed against Suno, the press release says.

The chamber distinguished two American training cases, Bartz v Anthropic and Kadrey v Meta, in which US courts had found training to be fair use: there, the training data had not been made available to users in the outputs, or not substantially. Here it had. The court's press release does not spell out the wording of the injunction; JUVE Patent reported that the court ordered Suno to "cease the unauthorised reproduction of the protected musical works and to stop using the works to train the AI model". In its analysis, the law firm Reed Smith noted that the court carried out a full US fair use analysis rather than declining the question as outside its competence.

What the two sides said

"AI models built on stolen intellectual property have no protection under the law," GEMA's chief executive Tobias Holzmüller said, according to Euronews. GEMA, which represents more than 100,000 composers, lyricists and publishers, filed the suit in January 2025 and wants AI developers to license its repertoire and pay the authors it represents.

This ruling sends a powerful international message: creativity has value, and creators' rights must be respected in the age of artificial intelligence.
Ralf Weigand, chairman of GEMA's board, quoted by Euronews, 5 August 2026

Suno said it disagreed with the ruling, which it said "rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of how Suno's technology works, how it is used and how U.S. law applies", and that it was "evaluating all available options, including an appeal". The company settled with Warner Music Group in November 2025 through a licensing deal but remains in litigation with Universal and Sony, and Denmark's collecting society Koda has also brought claims, MBW reported.

What comes next

The judgment is not final, the court said, and the damages have not been set: Suno must first disclose the revenue it earned from the infringements. An appeal would go to the Higher Regional Court in Munich, where GEMA's lyrics case against OpenAI is already pending, Reed Smith noted. The wider question sits in Luxembourg. On 10 March 2026 the EU Court of Justice held its first hearing on generative AI and copyright, in Like Company v Google; the case asks whether training a language model is a reproduction and whether the text and data mining exception covers it. An Advocate General's opinion was expected on 3 September.