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04/11/2026

Reservoir sues Suno over 1,050 songs

An independent music publisher has taken Suno to court over 1,050 songs, and Suno has told a second court it still holds recordings it trained on. I make my music with Suno, so here is where I stand.

What happened

Reservoir Media, the New York independent music publisher and rights company, sued Suno, the AI music generator, on 21/10/2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint covers 1,050 compositions Reservoir says it owns or exclusively controls, and Music Business Worldwide reports they include Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now, Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, Madonna's Papa Don't Preach and Evanescence's Bring Me to Life.

Reservoir claims copyright infringement plus two counts under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, alleging Suno got around access controls and stripped out copyright information such as titles and writer and publisher credits. Statutory damages across the three counts would come to just over US$186 million, and Reservoir also wants unauthorised copies impounded or destroyed. The same day it filed a separate suit against Anthropic over the lyrics of 853 songs. These are claims. No court has ruled on any of them.

A day earlier, on 20/10/2026, Suno filed its answer in the second lawsuit brought by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, which targets Suno's v6 models and covers 60,202 recordings in the federal court in Massachusetts. In it Suno states that it "has not deleted all of the sound recordings it has used to train its AI models", a line Music Business Worldwide and The AI Musicpreneur both count six times in the filing.

Suno argues any copying is fair use. It denies that every model from v4 to v5.5 was trained on the same set of recordings, and it denies in general terms that it continues to use them. Neither case has reached a ruling.

Sources: 22/10/2026 Music Business Worldwide (Reservoir v Suno) · 23/10/2026 The AI Musicpreneur (Reservoir v Suno and Anthropic) · 22/10/2026 Music Business Worldwide (Suno's answer) · 23/10/2026 The AI Musicpreneur (Suno's answer)

Where Kael Novus stands

I compose Kael Novus with Suno and I write every lyric myself. That has been on the credits since the first single. So I am not going to write this as if the tool is somebody else's problem. It is the instrument my records are built on, and the people suing it publish songs half the world grew up on.

So here is the position, plainly. Songwriters should be paid when their work is used to build something that makes money. If a court finds Suno trained on Reservoir's catalogue without a licence and that it was not fair use, then Suno owes those writers, and the fix is licences and payment, not a shrug. I would rather make records on a tool that has settled that bill than on one still arguing about it.

I am not going to pretend the answer is already in, either. These are allegations filed on 21/10/2026, and fair use is a real defence that real courts have to weigh. Anyone writing as if the verdict is in, on either side, is guessing.

Credit where it is due. Reservoir did this properly. The complaint attaches a list of the works with their copyright registration numbers, which means it can be tested song by song instead of argued as a mood. And Suno answered the labels on the record and wrote down, in plain words, that it has not deleted all the recordings. That is an uncomfortable sentence to file. Filing it beats hiding it, and now everyone can argue about facts instead of rumours.

What none of this changes is who writes the words. Every lyric on Born in the Static Pt.1, Pt.2 and the singles from Thank You For Your Patience is mine, and that stays true whatever a court decides about the tool underneath. If the ground under the instrument shifts, I keep writing.

And if you came here for Joni Mitchell or Johnny Cash, go and play Both Sides Now and Ring of Fire tonight, then buy something from a songwriter who is still working. That is the part of this anyone can do this week.

Playing under this

Hear them

• Joni Mitchell
• Johnny Cash