IP Law Daily, PUBLICITY RIGHTS NEWS—A multi-jurisdiction class action lawsuit is filed against Suno over publicity rights, (Sep 8, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The AI company’s “name-indexing” system allegedly allows users to enter the name of artists and generate music evoking their style.

A leading music generation company “encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model” and now exploits those identities by allowing users to replicate them, a new federal lawsuit contends. The class action lawsuit, filed in a Massachusetts district court, is perhaps the most aggressive and wide-ranging effort to date to hold artificial intelligence companies to account for alleged misappropriation of name, image, and likeness rights (Isbell v. Suno, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-14005-PGL (D. Mass. Aug. 31, 2026)).

The target of the lawsuit is Suno, the market leader in AI-powered music generation. The plaintiffs. Jason Isbell is a singer-songwriter and six-time Grammy winner who played with Drive-By Truckers before launching a solo career. David Lowery is a musician known for his work as lead singer in the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. Guy Forsyth is a Texas-based blues singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has released numerous albums and toured extensively in the United States and Europe. Eduardo Calle is a Grammy Award-winning saxophonist who has appeared on more than 1,700 albums and roughly 10,000 singles.

Unlike most industry lawsuits against AI, the class action lawsuit is not based on copyright law. The complaint’s introductory paragraphs make that clear: “What follows is not offered to establish that any Suno output literally reproduces any specific recording, and no claim in this Complaint depends on any such showing.” Instead, it is brought under a patchwork of laws of 14 states plus Puerto Rico, some statutory and some common law, that protect the right of publicity—or as it is more commonly known, the right to protect one’s name, image, and likeness. Suno admits, the complaint alleges, that it “scraped the work of practically all of the musicians on the internet.” And it did so, the complaint asserts, “in order to extract musicians’ identities” and then monetize that data through its name-indexed platform.

The core of the complaint is built around Suno’s practice of “name-indexing.” Suno’s platform allows users to input prompts requesting that the model generate a song in response. But one of the prompts that users can input, the complaint alleges, is the name of a musician. That name, the complaint asserts, works as “a retrieval key for a set of performer-specific representations that it can use to generate a response associated with that musician.” Indeed, from a name prompt alone, the complaint alleges, “a user receives a multi-modal experience evoking that named musician”—including “access to a generated song like one the named musician might create, a description of the musician's attributes, and a related image.”

The complaint provides a number of examples. For example, when “jason isbell” was entered into Suno, the complaint asserts, the service produced an Americana song called “Paper Bell” that imitated “Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang.” When Camper Van Beethoven was entered into Suno, the complaint alleges, it provided a song that evoked its “playful lyrics and sound.” And when Ed Calle was entered into Suno, the complaint asserts, Suno produced two songs called “Ed Calle” that included an image of a saxophone in the shadow of palm trees, “evoking both [Calle’s] instrument and his home state.”

And while Suno ostensibly has a filter in place that prevents users from entering the names of individual artists, the complaint asserts, that filter is “easily defeated” even when it functions at all. For example, entering “m i c h a e l j a c k s o n” (with spaces) triggered “two energetic pop songs named—by Suno—“Glovebox Moonwalk.” A similar prompt could be used, the complaint asserts, to obtain music in the style of Tom Waits, Bad Bunny, Bruno Mars, and Snoop Dogg, among others. And even where the filter rejects a name typed without spaces, the complaint notes, it opens a pop-up saying “We don't reference artists directly, so we've replaced your prompt with similar styles you might like”—“the system announcing that it, in fact, identified the musician in the name-prompt and is offering substitutes.”

The action arises out of Illinois' Right of Publicity Act, 765 ILCS 1075/1 et seq.; the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14/1 et seq.; the California common-law right of publicity; New York Civil Rights Law§§ 50-f and 51; and the right-of-publicity laws of Michigan, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.

The Case is No. 1:26-cv-14005-PGL.

Judge: NA

Attorneys: Alan D. Rose, Sr. (Rose Law Partners LLP) for Jason Isbell.

Companies: Suno, Inc.

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