GEMA's Copyright Case Against Suno Heads to a Munich Verdict

On Friday morning, at 9 a.m. local time in courtroom 270 of Munich's Justizpalast, a German judge will read out a verdict that the global music and AI industries have been bracing for. The 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich Regional Court, presided over by Judge Schwager, is scheduled to rule on July 31 in GEMA v. Suno — the first major European court test of whether generative-AI music tools may train on, and regurgitate, copyright-protected songs without a license.

The stakes reach far beyond one platform. GEMA, Germany's collecting society for composers, lyricists and music publishers, is asking the court to declare that AI training on protected music requires permission from rights holders — a finding that could reshape how the entire EU treats the material feeding music-generation models.

What GEMA alleges

GEMA filed suit against US-headquartered Suno Inc. on January 21, 2025, becoming the first collecting society in the world to take a generative-AI music provider to court. The society represents more than 100,000 members in Germany and, through reciprocal deals, over two million rights holders worldwide.

Its core claim is twofold. First, that Suno trained its model on GEMA's repertoire without a license — allegedly scraping music from the open internet, including via "stream ripping" from YouTube that GEMA says circumvented the platform's technical protection measures. Second, that Suno's outputs are not merely AI-inspired but reproduce identifiable works. GEMA documented AI-generated tracks it calls "misleadingly similar" to originals in melody, harmony and rhythm, naming songs such as Alphaville's "Forever Young," Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5," Modern Talking's "Cheri Cheri Lady" and Boney M.'s "Daddy Cool." At the March 9, 2026 oral hearing, both the original recordings and Suno's outputs were played aloud in the packed courtroom.

"Our members' songs are not free raw material for generative AI systems providers' business models," said Dr. Tobias Holzmüller, GEMA's CEO. "Anyone who wants to use these songs must acquire a license and remunerate the authors fairly. We have developed a license model for this. We are taking and will always take legal action against unlicensed use."

GEMA's general counsel, Dr. Kai Welp, framed the case as a jurisdictional line in the sand. "Like everyone else, providers of generative AI must respect copyright and remunerate authors for their creative work," he said after the hearing. "This must also apply if the systems are trained outside the European Union and offered on the European market."

Suno's defense

Suno has argued that its outputs are "not recognizable in any way" as the underlying works and that any reproduction during training is lawful under Germany's text-and-data-mining (TDM) exception, which implements the EU's 2019 Copyright Directive. That exception permits automated analysis of lawfully accessible content to extract patterns and correlations — the legal foundation many AI developers lean on for training.

The catch is the directive's opt-out: rights holders can reserve their works from commercial TDM. GEMA says it declared exactly that reservation on behalf of its members, having amended its members' authorization agreement back in 2022 to cover such uses. If the court accepts that the opt-out was validly declared, Suno's TDM shield may not hold — and separately, GEMA argues that storing lyrics and reproducing recordings inside a model goes beyond what TDM was ever meant to cover.

Why this is Europe's test case, not America's

The German action is legally distinct from Suno's US battles, where Sony, Universal and Warner, coordinated by the RIAA, sued Suno and rival Udio in June 2024 for "mass infringement." Warner settled with Suno in November 2025; the others continue.

The two systems turn on opposite defaults. US courts weigh the flexible, judge-made "fair use" doctrine, which asks whether a use is transformative and how it affects the market. The EU offers no such open-ended safety valve. Instead it grants a specific TDM exception with an explicit opt-out — a more mechanical, rules-based framework. As GEMA puts it, in Europe it is "expressly and clearly regulated" that AI providers may not train on works for which a reservation has been declared, whereas in the US the question remains contested. A German ruling for GEMA would signal that the EU's opt-out has real teeth against models trained abroad but sold into the European market.

The Munich chamber has already shown its hand once. In November 2025, the same 42nd Civil Chamber ruled largely for GEMA against OpenAI, finding that ChatGPT reproduced protected song lyrics without a license. That decision concerned text; the Suno case reaches GEMA's "core business" of playable compositions, making it the more consequential of the two.

What to watch on July 31

The verdict was originally set for June 12 and pushed to July 31 for what the court called "internal administrative reasons," unrelated to the merits. When Judge Schwager reads the decision, the key questions are whether the court finds Suno's outputs infringing, whether it rejects the TDM defense in light of GEMA's opt-out, and whether it endorses GEMA's view that EU copyright obligations bind models trained anywhere but offered in Europe.

A win for GEMA would strengthen its push for a market-wide AI licensing model and could nudge holdout developers toward the negotiating table it says it has been trying to open. A win for Suno would validate the TDM-plus-transformation defense and embolden AI music firms across the continent. Either way, an appeal to the Higher Regional Court is likely, and the questions may ultimately land at the Court of Justice of the EU. Friday is the first word, not the last — but in Europe's fight over AI and music, it is the word everyone has been waiting for.