GEMA v. Suno: Germany's Second AI Music Front

Case: GEMA v. Suno, Inc., Munich Regional Court, Germany — filed January 2025. No US PACER docket; this is a German civil proceeding.

Weeks after offering AI companies a purpose-built licensing model and months before it would go on to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT, GEMA — Germany's music collecting society — filed a separate copyright suit against AI music generator Suno in the Munich Regional Court in January 2025. The suit alleges that Suno trained its AI model on original recordings from GEMA's repertoire and that the platform now generates outputs GEMA describes as misleadingly similar to the original works, rather than merely inspired by them.

The case has moved on a slower track than GEMA's OpenAI suit: a first hearing was held in March 2026, and a verdict was scheduled for July 31, 2026 — a date that, depending on when this resource is published, may already have passed and should be checked before this article goes live. If GEMA prevails, the ruling would be the second adverse German court decision against a major AI company in roughly a year, following the November 2025 ruling against OpenAI, and would add further pressure on Suno specifically as it simultaneously defends the RIAA-coordinated suit brought by Universal, Sony, and Warner in the US, plus Denmark's Koda suit and a growing list of independent-artist actions.

Notably, Suno has already settled its US dispute with Warner Music Group and is in a licensing partnership with the label — but that settlement has no bearing on GEMA's separate German claim, which involves different rights holders (GEMA's members, rather than Warner's catalog) and proceeds under German rather than US copyright law. For a company facing litigation on multiple continents simultaneously, resolving one dispute doesn't shrink the overall exposure; it simply removes one plaintiff from one jurisdiction.

Source reporting: Music Business Worldwide, "$500m-valued Suno hit with new copyright lawsuit from Germany's GEMA" (January 21, 2025).

Key Filings

• No US PACER/CourtListener docket exists for this case — it is a German civil proceeding before the Munich Regional Court. Pleadings and the eventual verdict would need to be sourced from German court records or GEMA's own press materials, which have not been retrieved for this article.

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