Suno has asked a federal judge to dismiss the proposed class action lawsuit brought against it by Jason Isbell and three other musicians.
The AI music company filed its motion on Tuesday (November 3) in Boston federal court, arguing that the musicians’ right-of-publicity claims fail as a matter of law. You can read it in full here.
“When people describe styles of music, they often use artists’ names as shorthand for the genre they perform in,” the filing states. “Rather than say, ‘this sounds like an instance of late 1980s/early 1990s arena rock, with glam metal influences that simultaneously presage the rise of grunge,’ they might just say, ‘this sounds like Guns N’ Roses.'”
The motion also quotes an August blog post by Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, which says the company has “never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs.”
In its October 20 answer to the second copyright lawsuit brought against it by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, Suno admitted that it “previously prevented users from submitting prompts containing artist names, and that as of January 2026, users may include artist names in their prompts” – while denying that those prompts are used to generate outputs “without first converting the artist name to a style description.”
Isbell filed the proposed class action on August 31 alongside Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery, Texas blues musician Guy Forsyth, and Florida saxophonist Eduardo Calle, on behalf of musicians whose names Suno has accepted as prompts, with claims under the laws of more than a dozen states.
The 84-page complaint, as reported by MBW at the time, contains no copyright claim.
Instead, it accuses Suno of indexing musicians by name and answering those names with songs, text descriptions, and cover images that evoke them, and of extracting the musicians’ identifying attributes to train its models.
The complaint itself says the musicians “claim no ownership of country music, of Americana music, or of any genre, style, or musical idea.” Their claim, it states, “is narrower and older than that: no one may commercially exploit another’s right of publicity in their name and identity.”
Suno’s motion counters that ownership of a genre or style is “exactly what their legal theory would confer.”
According to the motion, a request for a song in the style of Isbell is effectively translated by Suno into one for a song in the style of “contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar.”
That is the description Suno attached to Paper Bell, the track cited in the complaint as the output of a “jason isbell” prompt.
“There is nothing unlawful about that,” the motion states. “No state confers a right of publicity that prohibits a musician in a studio from saying to their producer, ‘let’s go for something here with more of a Jason Isbell vibe,’ and actually achieving that result without infringing any copyright or creating a likelihood of confusion over the identity of the performer.
“And what Suno does, by Plaintiffs’ own account, is no different.”
In the motion, Suno says it does not train its model to recognize artist names, and that “there is no ‘artist name’ metadata field in the source material used to train the model.”
“When a user types, for example, ‘Duran Duran’ into a prompt, that name is replaced with a description of the genre the model can understand – say, ‘New wave, Synth-pop, Pop rock’ – before the operative instructions are transmitted to the model,” the filing explains.
The complaint alleged that Suno’s artist-name filter could be bypassed by typing “t a y l o r s w i f t” with spaces between the letters. Suno describes such allegations as “a handful of examples in which this function worked imperfectly in response to atypical requests involving artists who are not plaintiffs in this lawsuit.”
The complaint also alleges that techniques for generating music that sounds like a particular musician “are encouraged by Suno’s own paid marketing partners.”
“Internal, backend uses of a celebrity’s name have never been the conduct regulated by the right of publicity tort.”
Suno, motion to dismiss
A key part of the motion is the argument that the right of publicity requires a defendant to make public use of a person’s name – which Suno says it doesn’t do.
When a user types an artist’s name into a prompt, the motion says, “that is at most a use of the artist’s name by the user – not by Suno.” It adds that “secondary liability for a right of publicity claim is not a recognized concept in the law.”
“Internal, backend uses of a celebrity’s name have never been the conduct regulated by the right of publicity tort,” Suno argues.
The complaint had already pushed back on that point: “The heart of Plaintiffs’ claims is Suno’s own conduct, not any act by a user.” It also alleges that Suno “now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit.”
The filing also cites Isbell’s own past interviews, including one in which he said “when it’s done right, the songs of mine that are the best hopefully remind people of John Prine or Guy Clark or Kris Kristofferson or something like that.”
“Nobody would suggest that Isbell violated these artists’ right of publicity by publicly comparing his own work to their musical styles (much less considering those artists and their associated musical styles in the process of creation),” the motion states.
“Congress made the considered policy choice not to confer intellectual property protection on an artistic style, precisely to allow subsequent creators to build on the prior works of a genre.”
Suno, motion to dismiss
Suno also argues that the plaintiffs’ name-recognition theory would be barred by the First Amendment, and that the claims are preempted by the federal Copyright Act.
“Congress made the considered policy choice not to confer intellectual property protection on an artistic style, precisely to allow subsequent creators to build on the prior works of a genre,” the motion reads. “The theory of this Complaint would create a shadow state law IP regime sitting on top of and fundamentally conflicting with the federal regime that has been in place for more than two centuries.”
The motion singles out Lowery, noting that works by Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker are among those asserted in the second suit, which Universal and Sony filed on September 18.
“Lowery evidently has no copyright over those works,” the filing says, adding that he nonetheless seeks to control them “under a competing theory of intellectual property.”
The complaint had cited Warner Music Group’s November 2025 settlement and licensing deal with Suno, along with BMG’s deal in August, as evidence that a label’s authority to license a recording does not, by itself, give Suno the right to use a performer’s identity.
Suno further argues that the named plaintiffs’ claims fail under the laws of their home states: Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, and Florida.
On Isbell’s Tennessee claim, it says he hasn’t alleged that Suno used his voice, pointing to the complaint’s own allegation that “the quality of Suno’s outputs falls short of the true talent it evokes.”
The complaint alleges that Paper Bell imitated “Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang.” Suno’s motion describes those same traits as characteristic of the genre.
Suno also wants the claim brought under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) dismissed, arguing that none of the four plaintiffs has standing to bring it.
Under the first-to-file rule, it says the claim should at least be stayed in light of the BIPA suit filed in October 2025 by songwriter David Woulard, “an actual Illinois resident,” as the motion puts it.
The plaintiffs’ opposition is due by December 1, with Suno’s reply due by December 15, under a schedule approved by US District Judge Angel Kelley.Music Business Worldwide