The Copyright Reckoning
Music is poised to be a pivotal battleground in the fight over copyright and Fair Use. Recently, major music labels added stream ripping allegations to copyright lawsuits against AI music generation platforms Suno and Udio. I couldn’t help but notice that Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the noble defenders of tech’s divine right to violate copyright, were early investors in Udio, one of the music-generating AI models that is currently in hot water.
Sony Music, UMG and Warner Records were already suing Suno and Udio for mass copyright infringement, but the charge added in September of 2025 isn’t a minor technicality. Stream ripping is a deliberate circumvention of encryption designed to protect copyrighted content and violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). There is no “oops, that was an accident” defense. It’s so blatant.