US Appeals Court Rejects Fair-Use Defense for AI Training, Raising Stakes for Music Labels vs. Suno

The US Court of Appeals ruled against ROSS Intelligence on September 29, finding that the AI legal research company could not claim fair use for training its models on Thomson Reuters data. The decision sets a significant legal precedent: courts are willing to reject the argument that scraping copyrighted material for AI training constitutes transformative, protected use.

The ruling has direct implications for the ongoing lawsuits brought by major music labels against generative-AI music companies such as Suno. If the fair-use shield that AI companies have leaned on fails to hold in appellate courts, it substantially strengthens the labels' position and could force the broader generative-AI industry to renegotiate how it sources training data.