Sony Just Filed a Second Udio Lawsuit Rather Than Accept a Judge's Limit. Read the Divergence.
Sony filed a fresh Udio suit covering 30,000-plus recordings, splitting from Universal and Warner and setting up a catalog-scale precedent fight.
· 4 min read
If you are an artist, a manager, or a rights holder watching the AI licensing gold rush, here is the question that should keep you up: are the majors going to fight for a legal precedent that protects catalog owners, or are they going to cash out one settlement at a time? For the past several months, the answer has been drifting toward the second option. One major just yanked it back to the first.
The story so far had a tidy arc. Universal, Warner, and Sony sued the AI music generators in 2024 for infringement at what the complaints called "almost unimaginable scale." Then Universal and Warner settled, licensed, and started building a walled-garden product with the very company they had accused of stealing their catalogs. The united front was cracking. And then Sony did something that tells you exactly where it stands.
Sony Music has filed an entirely new copyright infringement lawsuit against Udio, asserting 30,117 sound recordings the label says the AI company copied without permission, Music Business Worldwide reported. The complaint landed Monday, July 20, in the Southern District of New York, brought by Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels including Arista and LaFace.
Here is why the filing matters more than the raw number. Sony did not want a second lawsuit. It wanted to add these 30,000-plus recordings to its original 2024 case. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said no. Adding tens of thousands of works, he ruled, would "substantially prejudice defendants and unduly delay the resolution of this action," per Billboard. But the judge left a door open, noting that Sony has "the right to seek to stop infringement of, and recover damages for, all copyrighted works," just not necessarily inside that one case.
Sony walked straight through that door. Rather than accept a court-imposed cap on its first suit, it filed a second one built on everything discovery in the original case turned up.
The Numbers Tell You How Serious This Is
The original case covered 333 recordings. The new suit pushes the count past 30,000, which balloons Udio's potential damages exposure from roughly $50 million to about $4.5 billion, Billboard noted. Sony is seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $2,500 for each act of DMCA circumvention, along with an injunction.
And even 30,117 is not the ceiling. Discovery let Sony inspect Udio's training data and match hundreds of thousands of its recordings using audio fingerprinting, MBW reported. The label calls the 30,000-plus in this suit "only a small portion" of what Udio actually copied.
The Argument Sony Is Building
The new complaint is not just bigger. It is sharper, because it now uses Udio's own conduct against it. Since launching, Udio has signed licensing deals with Universal, Warner, Merlin, Kobalt, Believe, and the National Music Publishers' Association. Sony's lawyers turned that into a weapon.
Fair use analysis weighs market harm, meaning whether the alleged infringement damaged an existing licensing market. Sony's answer, as Digital Music News laid out, is that Udio's own deals prove the market exists. "A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs," the complaint reads. Or, as Sony put it more bluntly, "Udio's belated embrace of licensing only underscores the unlawfulness of its decision to copy Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings, without a license, in the first place."
Sony is not betting everything on fair use, either. The suit revives the DMCA angle, alleging Udio stream-ripped recordings from YouTube using the tool YT-DLP to circumvent the platform's protections, MBW reported. Udio has acknowledged pulling audio from YouTube for training. Sony's counter is simple: "fair use is not a defense for violation of the Copyright Act's anti-circumvention clause." That matters because it hands the label a claim that survives even if a court blesses AI training as transformative. If you followed the fair use fight, you know why the DMCA hook is the smart hedge.
The Divergence You Should Actually Watch
Sony is now the sole major still suing Udio. It and Universal are also still suing Suno, while Warner has settled there too. That is not a coincidence of timing. It is a genuine split in strategy among the three companies that control most of recorded music.
Universal's Jonathan Dworkin publicly praised Udio's CEO at a January conference, per Music Ally, calling him "very sincere." Sony is aiming for his feet, not his character.
There is a cynical read here, and it is a fair one: maximum legal pressure is also maximum leverage. A $4.5 billion exposure number makes any eventual settlement richer. But do not miss the structural stakes. A definitive win against Udio at catalog scale would set the terms for how every AI company gets held liable, and it would strengthen the live cases against Suno. Sony is even careful to say it is not anti-AI, noting there is "room for AI and human creators to forge a sustainable, complementary relationship" through free-market licensing.
The other two majors decided the check was worth more than the precedent. Sony decided the precedent is worth more than the check. One of those bets is about to define what your catalog is worth to a machine.
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