Key holding or allegation
On 18 Aug 2026 the court allowed a proposed §1201(a)(1) circumvention claim as plausibly pleaded, while separately denying without prejudice an attempt to add 61,026 recordings because of delay and case-management concerns.
Why it matters
Major AI-music case separating the legality of training from acquisition methods and illustrating work-by-work case-management problems after training-corpus discovery.
Facts
Record labels allege Suno copied sound recordings for training and generated competitive music outputs; discovery produced additional allegations concerning acquisition from YouTube and circumvention of its Rolling Cipher.
Issues before the court
Whether the alleged YouTube stream-ripping states a §1201(a)(1) claim, whether training is fair use, and how additional works should be litigated.
What the court did not decide
Actual circumvention, effectiveness of the access control, training fair use, output infringement, damages and liability for the additional 61,026 works remain unresolved.
Procedural timeline
U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Complaint filed / ongoing litigation: Record labels allege Suno trained on protected sound recordings and generated infringing music outputs.
U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Order granting leave to amend: Proposed DMCA §1201(a)(1) claim based on alleged circumvention of YouTube's rolling cipher was plausibly pleaded and not futile.
U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Order denying leave to amend without prejudice: Court denied without prejudice the labels' attempt to add 61,026 additional recordings, finding that expansion would materially complicate and delay the existing 560-work case and indicating parallel litigation could preserve those claims.
U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
First Amended Complaint filed: Following the 18 August leave-to-amend order, the labels filed an amended complaint adding the DMCA stream-ripping/circumvention theory concerning alleged acquisition from YouTube.
U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Parallel additional-works action filed: Following the 18 August denial without prejudice of leave to add a large group of additional recordings, label plaintiffs filed a separate Suno action concerning 60,202 additional sound recordings.