Truck driver and recording artist Tony Justice is at the forefront of a lawsuit against a company that markets an artificial intelligence program for generating music, accusing the company of copying existing music to produce new songs.
The lawsuit, Justice v. Suno Inc., was originally filed more than a year ago on June 14, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. An amended complaint from Justice was filed in September. Justice is also involved in a separate but similar suit in New York against Uncharted Labs Inc., doing business as Udio.com. Both cases are still going through the legal process as of July 21.
Justice, his record company 5th Wheel Records and publisher My Heartland Publishing highlighted a June 24, 2024, lawsuit filed by some of the world’s largest recording labels -- UMG Recordings, Inc., Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music International Services Limited -- alleging copyright infringement for willfully using their copyrighted sound recordings to train Suno’s AI music generator.
Yet independent artists like Justice have had their “exclusive rights in their sound recordings and their underlying compositions have been trampled most severely,” the amended complaint states. The lawsuit further says that Suno has admitted to “scraping and duplicating ‘tens of millions’ of ‘publicly available’ songs,” adding that the company’s “actions were not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the music community's most vulnerable and valuable creators.”
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Justice said lawyers reached out to him to be the lead plaintiff in the case to represent independent artists, as the major labels were already in litigation. With Justice being a pioneer of “trucking music,” the lawyers told him, he would be a good representative for the case.
“We’re trying to make mainstream hits and here comes all these AI songs flooding the music distributors and creating tons of competition,” Justice said. He noted that he’s never been involved in “anything like this,” but after “a lot of thought and prayer,” he decided to join the case.
He added that he’s not “fundamentally against AI,” as a lot of artists can’t afford to demo songs and can use AI cheaply create demos. “But AI didn’t know how to write a song just by itself.”
Justice and the plaintiffs claim that Suno is using their songs to train its AI, and once trained, “those songs are stored in the AI’s neural network, and not capable of deletion or retraction,” the lawsuit adds.
Plaintiffs claimed that Suno obtained the songs by unlawfully “stream ripping” them off of YouTube and circumvented YouTube’s measures designed to prevent unauthorized copying.
Additionally, Suno is alleged to have “generated AI-soundalike music based on the songs of” Justice and the plaintiffs.
Suno in its defense said that its use of the music is shielded by the doctrine of fair use, yet Justice’s lawsuit claims Suno “fails to account for, and conveniently ignores, the end purpose analysis for AI training,” which is a key aspect of analyzing fair use, according to prior Supreme Court rulings.
Justice’s lawsuit points to a May 2025 report from the U.S. Copyright Office regarding copyright and AI that emphasized “that the fair use doctrine does not excuse unauthorized training on expressive works (e.g., music) particularly when those works are used to generate substitutional outputs that may replace the originals in the relevant marketplace.”
Justice and the plaintiffs allege that Suno violated the Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Music Modernization Act (MMA), and the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. The lawsuit seeks:
- A judgement that Suno violated the above acts
- Injunctive relief to block Suno from further using plaintiffs’ songs without authorization and circumventing streaming platforms’ protection measures
- Remedial measures, including ordering Suno to “delete, purge, and destroy all unauthorized copies” of plaintiffs’ works from its systems
- Damages under the Copyright Act, DMCA, MMA and Tennessee state law
- Equitable restitution “of all ill-gotten gains, revenues, and profits derived from its unlawful conduct”
- Attorneys’ fees and costs, pre- and post-judgement interest and any further relief deemed just and proper by the court.
Suno has argued that portions of the case should be dismissed due to an alleged failure by the plaintiffs to state a claim.
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