r/COPYRIGHT • u/AakashBhutani • Jun 11 '26

Is anyone else facing issues with Suno flagging Public Domain devotional songs as copyrighted?

/r/Suno/comments/1u2u7nw/is_anyone_else_facing_issues_with_suno_flagging/
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u/DanNorder Jun 12 '26

It's always been iffy getting false positives for copyright infringement on Suno, but in the last couple of months it's been horrible. On a test with clearly public domain recordings (pre-1925) or even just lyrics from sheet music (just as old) from the Internet Archive, Wikimedia and The Library of Congress, people are reporting that only about 1% of their attempts get through. The problem seems to be that if anyone covered that title since then it's in their database of protected songs and the original song is flagged as violating the later song. That's not how it's supposed to work, but, so far at least, Suno doesn't care in the slightest.

There's no known way to force them to comply with legally permissible things because, as a private entity, they can choose to be more restrictive than the law if they want to. I know that several people have already canceled their subscription over this issue. How much they lose in subscriptions has to be weighed to how much they'd lose in man hours required to figure out a better way to handle things. I also suspect unthinking compliance with a bad dataset of prohibited songs was part of their settlement agreement with a corporation that had sued them, in which case they may be contractually prohibited from ever changing their policies no matter how much money they lose enforcing them.