On July 31, 2026, the Munich Regional Court ruled against Suno, the AI tool that lets anyone generate a full, playable song from a text prompt. The case was brought by GEMA, Germany’s collecting society for composers, songwriters and music publishers — a role similar to Ecad’s in Brazil. Suno itself is not owned by a big tech company. It was founded in 2022 by four former engineers of the fintech firm Kensho, and is backed by venture investors at a valuation of $5.4 billion.
The court’s 42nd Civil Chamber, led by Judge Elke Schwager, found that Suno infringed six well-known songs — including “Daddy Cool,” “Rasputin,” “Forever Young” and “Mambo No. 5” — twice over: once in the US, during training, and again in Germany, where the songs were stored inside the model and handed back to users as outputs. The court ordered Suno to stop reproducing the songs, to disclose the revenue tied to that use, and to pay damages still to be set. The ruling is not final yet. Suno says it disagrees and may appeal.
Memorization, not just “learning”
GEMA said Suno trained its models by pulling the six songs off YouTube, breaking a copy-protection method called the rolling cipher to do it. The court agreed. But the bigger question was “what happens next”.
Suno’s defense followed the standard line used by AI companies: a model does not store the songs it learns from, it only picks up patterns — melody, rhythm, structure — not the songs themselves. The Munich court did not accept that here. It found that the six songs were kept inside Suno’s model in a form the system could reproduce, a process the court called “memorization”, and that the AI’s outputs matched the originals too closely to be a coincidence.
That mattered a lot legally. Because the songs were kept, not just analyzed, the court said the EU’s data-mining exception for AI training did not apply. And because a simple prompt — just a title and a genre — could produce a result close enough to the original, the court also stated that US “fair use” did not help Suno either. It noted that in other US cases where AI companies won on fair use, users never got an output this close to someone else’s song.
This is GEMA’s second win against an AI company. In November 2025, the same court ruled that OpenAI needed a GEMA license to reproduce German song lyrics in ChatGPT — the first time a European court sided with music creators against an AI provider. That ruling is not final either: OpenAI has appealed to a higher court in Munich. The Suno case goes further: it touches GEMA’s core business, licensing the music itself, not just the words.
Legal commentators are already calling the Suno decision the first European ruling to clearly require a license before a company can train a music AI on protected songs. A German ruling does not bind courts in other EU countries.
However, since the same Munich chamber has now taken this position twice, in two separate cases, other European courts are likely to look at its reasoning when similar disputes reach them.
The view from Brazil
Brazil has not yet seen a court ruling of this kind yet. However, it is facing the same debate, which is currently being discussed in Congress.
Brazilian copyright law (Law 9.610/98) protects a work no matter the format, and provides no general exception for AI training. That silence points in the same direction as the Munich ruling: using someone’s music to train an AI, without permission, is not clearly allowed just because the technology is new. What is missing is not the protection itself, but a clear rule for how it applies to AI. That rule is exactly what is being negotiated in Brazil’s proposed AI bill — known by its legislative number, Bill of Law 2338/2023 — approved by the Senate in December 2024 and still sitting in a special committee at the Chamber of Deputies.
Copyright has been one of the hardest points in that committee’s work. In May 2026, Ecad — Brazil’s central office for collecting and distributing music royalties — joined a group of entities from music, film, publishing and journalism in a letter asking the committee to require permission and payment before AI companies can train on protected works. This matters directly to Ecad: without that requirement in the law, there is no clear reason for an AI company to sign a license, and no royalties to pass on to composers. As of now, the bill is still waiting for the rapporteur’s opinion.
Even without a new law, Brazil’s collecting societies have already moved on their own. Since mid-2025, Ecad has required composers and producers to inform, when they register a song, whether AI tools were used to create it. This connects to a rule Brazil already has: a song made entirely by AI, with no human author, cannot be protected by copyright at all, since Law 9.610/98 requires a human author. So, Brazil has already answered one question. What it has not answered yet is the one Munich just decided for Germany: does training an AI on someone else’s music require a license in the first place?
What to watch
If Bill of Law 2338/2023 ends up requiring permission and payment for AI training, Brazil will land close to where GEMA landed in Munich. If it ends up with a broad exception for AI companies instead, rights holders will likely go to court anyway, arguing — as GEMA did — that copying is copying, regardless of how sophisticated the technology is. . Either way, this looks headed for litigation eventually. The law mostly decides who has to prove what, and how difficult it is to do so.
For those looking to protect their copyright in Brazil, the point is simple: no Brazilian court has ruled on this yet, but that does not mean there is no risk. Ecad and the other collecting societies are organized and already building the documentation — registrations, catalogs, declarations of AI use — needed to support a case like GEMA’s. Any company training AI on Brazilian music, text or video should expect this question to come up, whether or not B 2338/2023 passes with the exception rights holders are afraid of.
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Advogado(a) autor(a) do comentário: Natalia Eleutério Garcia Gazote, Lígia Ferreira Marcondes Rocha e Cesar Peduti Filho, Peduti Advogados
“Munich Regional Court stops Suno using GEMA-protected music”: https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/munich-regional-court-stops-suno-using-gema-protected-music/
“Suno infringed copyright in GEMA case, German court rules”: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-infringed-copyright-in-gema-case-german-court-rules/
“German court rules AI music firm Suno broke copyright rules”: https://www.reuters.com/world/german-court-rules-ai-music-firm-suno-broke-copyright-rules-2026-07-31/
“Suno Loses Landmark AI Lawsuit to German Performing Rights Society GEMA”: https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/suno-loses-ai-lawsuit-gema-1236825010/
“Open AI must pay GEMA licence fee for ChatGPT”: https://www.juve-patent.com/cases/open-ai-must-pay-gema-licence-fee-for-chatgpt/
“GEMA wins court ruling on breach of copyright by AI music firm Suno”: https://www.musicweek.com/publishing/read/gema-wins-court-ruling-on-breach-of-copyright-by-ai-music-firm-suno/094644
“GEMA vs. Suno: Munich Court Now Rules AI Music Training Illegal”: https://www.gearnews.com/gema-vs-suno-tech/
“Ecad e entidades da música entregam nova carta à Câmara para manter proteção aos direitos autorais no PL da IA”: https://www4.ecad.org.br/noticias/ecad-e-entidades-da-musica-entregam-nova-carta-a-camara-para-manter-protecao-aos-direitos-autorais-no-pl-da-ia/
“ECAD e a Proteção dos Direitos Autorais na Era da Inteligência Artificial”: https://sbacem.org.br/ecad-e-a-protecao-dos-direitos-autorais-na-era-da-inteligencia-artificial/
Comissão Especial sobre Inteligência Artificial (PL 2338/23), tramitação: https://www2.camara.leg.br/atividade-legislativa/comissoes/comissoes-temporarias/especiais/57a-legislatura/comissao-especial-sobre-inteligencia-artificial-pl-2338-23
PL 2338/2023, tramitação completa: https://www25.senado.leg.br/web/atividade/materias/-/materia/157233
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If you want to learn more about this topic, contact the author or the managing partner, Dr. Cesar Peduti Filho.