Suno tells judge artist names in prompts are just genre shorthand

Suno asked a federal judge in Boston on Tuesday, November 3, to dismiss the right-of-publicity class action brought by Jason Isbell and three other musicians, arguing that the claims fail as a matter of law. Music Business Worldwide reported on the filing. Its core argument: people use artists’ names as shorthand for a genre, and a prompt works the same way. Rather than describe a style at length, the motion says, they might just say “this sounds like Guns N’ Roses.”

Isbell filed the proposed class action on August 31 with David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, Texas blues musician Guy Forsyth and Florida saxophonist Eduardo Calle. It covers musicians whose names Suno has accepted as prompts, with claims under the laws of more than a dozen states. The 84-page complaint has no copyright claim. It accuses Suno of indexing musicians by name, answering those names with songs, text descriptions and cover images that evoke them, and extracting their identifying attributes to train its models.

The plaintiffs say they “claim no ownership of country music, of Americana music, or of any genre, style, or musical idea.” Their claim, the complaint says, “is narrower and older than that: no one may commercially exploit another’s right of publicity in their name and identity.” Suno counters that ownership of a genre or style is “exactly what their legal theory would confer.”

How Suno says the prompt works

The motion says Suno does not train its model to recognize artist names, and that “there is no ‘artist name’ metadata field in the source material used to train the model.” When a user types “Duran Duran,” the name is replaced with a description such as “New wave, Synth-pop, Pop rock” before the instructions reach the model.

The same applies to Paper Bell, the track the complaint cites as the output of a “jason isbell” prompt. Suno says it attached the description “contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar.” The complaint says the song imitated “Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang”; the motion describes those same traits as characteristic of the genre.

“No state confers a right of publicity that prohibits a musician in a studio from saying to their producer, ‘let’s go for something here with more of a Jason Isbell vibe,'” the motion says. What Suno does, by the plaintiffs’ own account, “is no different.” The filing also points to interviews in which Isbell compared his own songs to those of John Prine, Guy Clark and Kris Kristofferson, and argues that nobody would say he violated their rights by doing so.

The complaint alleged that Suno’s artist-name filter could be bypassed by typing “t a y l o r s w i f t” with spaces between the letters. Suno calls such allegations “a handful of examples in which this function worked imperfectly in response to atypical requests involving artists who are not plaintiffs in this lawsuit.” The complaint also alleges that techniques for generating music that sounds like a particular musician “are encouraged by Suno’s own paid marketing partners.”

The motion quotes an August blog post by co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, which says the company has “never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs.” In its October 20 answer to the second copyright lawsuit brought against it by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, Suno admitted it “previously prevented users from submitting prompts containing artist names, and that as of January 2026, users may include artist names in their prompts.”

Public use, preemption and state law

Suno’s main argument here is that the right of publicity requires a defendant to make public use of a person’s name, which Suno says it does not do. Typing an artist’s name into a prompt is, in the motion’s words, “at most a use of the artist’s name by the user,” and not a use by Suno. The motion adds that “secondary liability for a right of publicity claim is not a recognized concept in the law.” The complaint says “the heart of Plaintiffs’ claims is Suno’s own conduct, not any act by a user,” and alleges that Suno “now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit.”

Suno also argues that the name-recognition theory would be barred by the First Amendment and that the claims are preempted by the federal Copyright Act. “Congress made the considered policy choice not to confer intellectual property protection on an artistic style, precisely to allow subsequent creators to build on the prior works of a genre,” the motion reads.

The motion singles out Lowery. Works by Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker are among those asserted in the Universal and Sony suit, filed September 18. “Lowery evidently has no copyright over those works,” the filing says, adding that he nonetheless seeks to control them “under a competing theory of intellectual property.”

Suno further argues that the named plaintiffs’ claims fail under the laws of their home states: Tennessee, Georgia, Texas and Florida. On Isbell’s Tennessee claim, it says he has not alleged that Suno used his voice, citing the complaint’s own statement that “the quality of Suno’s outputs falls short of the true talent it evokes.”

Suno also wants the claim under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act dismissed, arguing that none of the four plaintiffs has standing to bring it. Under the first-to-file rule, it says, the claim should at least be stayed in light of the BIPA suit filed in October 2025 by songwriter David Woulard, “an actual Illinois resident,” as the motion puts it.

Under a schedule approved by US District Judge Angel Kelley, the plaintiffs’ opposition is due December 1 and Suno’s reply December 15.