Gerencia 360, a Burbank, California-based music company, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Suno and Bright Data in a United States federal court, alleging that Suno trained its artificial intelligence (AI) music model on Gerencia’s catalog without authorization.
Founded by Luis del Villar 13 years ago, Gerencia submitted the complaint to a California federal court. The action also names Bright Data, an Israel-based company that describes itself as providing clients with “ready-to-ingest petabyte-scale datasets.”
Bright Data and Suno are already defending a separate but similar suit filed by Round Hill Music. Both Round Hill and Gerencia 360 are represented by Adams & Reese and Skaggs Faucette.
The two complaints overlap considerably, with each seeking damages for allegedly unauthorized training, allegedly infringing outputs, alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and other claims.
Alleged scraping and training#
The Gerencia complaint states that Suno obtained copies of its copyrighted works by accessing platforms including YouTube and Deezer through automated scraping tools that bypassed login requirements, subscription gates, and technical anti-bot defenses, partly through tools and proxy services supplied by Bright Data.
“Suno then ingested these unauthorized copies into its training pipeline, producing an AI model capable of generating audio,” the complaint states.
The filing cites “15 Besos,” performed by Cornelio Vega y Su Dinastia, as an example. It says Suno would not create a Norteño song when the Spanish lyrics for “15 Besos” were supplied, but did create a song in the Norteño style with the lyrics translated into English under the name “Quince Besos.” The filing notes that “Quince” is Spanish for fifteen.
Damages sought#
Gerencia, whose roster includes Jonatan Sánchez, is seeking the following amounts:
- $66 million in direct infringement statutory damages from Suno
- $66 million from Bright Data for alleged contributory infringement
- About $33 million total from both defendants for alleged violations involving copyright management information (CMI) and anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA
