A Munich Court Ruled That the Copies Are Inside the Model

Europe now has its first court ruling on the merits about training a generative music model. On Friday morning the Landgericht München I found largely for GEMA, the German collecting society, against Suno Inc. — and it did so on a theory that goes further than the ones being litigated in the United States.

Two separate findings, not one

The 42nd Civil Chamber, the same copyright-specialist chamber that decided the OpenAI lyrics case in November 2025, split the infringement into two limbs. Storing the protected works inside the model infringes the reproduction right. Serving generated outputs to users infringes the right of making available to the public. Case number 42 O 763/25, presiding judge Elke Schwager. Six works were in suit, among them "Atemlos", "Mambo No. 5", "Forever Young" and "Rasputin". GEMA filed in January 2025 and represents roughly 95,000 German composers, lyricists and publishers.

The defence that failed

Suno argued that a trained model does not retain its training data. The court was unpersuaded, because GEMA showed outputs that tracked the originals closely enough to indicate memorisation. Suno also argued that any infringement is committed by the users typing the prompts. The chamber rejected that too, placing liability on the operator.

What this ruling is not

Three things are being overstated. It is not final — this is a first-instance judgment, appealable to the Oberlandesgericht München, and the trade press notes plainly that it has not entered into legal force. It is not European law — it binds Germany, and elsewhere in the EU it is persuasive at best. And there is no damages number: German practice runs these claims in stages, disclosure first and quantum later, so any figure attached to this ruling today is invented. The court also did not order Suno to take a licence. A licence may become commercially unavoidable as a consequence; that is not the same as a court imposing one.

Why Germany got here first

The theory that the model itself contains reproductions is the one US labels have struggled to land. It arrives while Sony is the last major still litigating against an AI music firm in the United States, where dispositive motions have slipped to April 2027. The same Munich chamber has now extended its narrow reading of the EU text-and-data-mining exception from text to music.