Jason Isbell Sues Suno Over Right-of-Publicity Claims — SkimNews
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- Jason Isbell, David Lowery (of Camper Van Beethoven), Guy Forsyth, and jazz saxophonist Ed Calle filed suit against Suno in Massachusetts federal court, obtained by Rolling Stone, alleging the AI company "encoded" their identities into its model "without consent."
- The lawsuit centers on right-of-publicity claims rather than copyright, arguing that an artist's identity right "belongs to the performer regardless of who owns any copyright in an underlying recording" and was never licensed to Suno.
- Suno's alleged output when prompted with artist names included an Americana track called "Paper Bell" from the prompt "Jason Isbell" and two songs called "Glovebox Moonwalk" — complete with lyrics and imagery referencing the moonwalk and white glove — from the spaced-out prompt "m i c h a e l j a c k s o n."
- The suit claims Suno's filters are easy to bypass, including by typing an artist's real name (prompting "Lonnie Rashid Lynn" produced Common-style tracks) or by adding a space between every letter of major names like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and Bruno Mars.
- Suno said the claims are "without merit" and pointed to platform protections including blocking prompts for specific artist names, working with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio and lyrics, and noting that CEO Mikey Shulman wrote last month that named-artist prompts are redirected to "descriptive musical characteristics."
- Many of the AI-generated example songs cited in the lawsuit, including "Paper Bell," were still available on Suno as of publication, according to Rolling Stone.
Why it matters: This is a right-of-publicity case rather than the copyright suits Suno and rivals have previously faced, arguing an artist's identity is a separately licensable asset that cannot be absorbed into training data under any recording-rights deal. Suno now has to defend specific, reproducible workarounds — spaced letters, real names — against a CEO who publicly claimed those prompts get redirected.
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