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Gavel Drop: "Both Sides Now" (SOCAN v. Suno) Sued in Toronto on September 2. Licensed by Warner and BMG on September 9. Same AI company, same week. Swipe → On September 2, SOCAN — the performing rights society for virtually every song played in Canada — filed a Statement of Claim in Federal Court against Suno, the AI music generator. Roughly 150 Suno outputs are listed by name and URL: Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Bryan Adams, the Weeknd, Avril Lavigne, Rush. Page 14 sets "Both Sides Now" against the machine's output, note for note. There's a lot of red. What makes this one different: it isn't a training case. SOCAN pleads no reproduction claim at all. It says Suno is an unlicensed streaming service — autoplay, playlists, staff picks, push-to-Spotify — and that Suno infringes by "standing ready, willing and able to generate" any song it memorized. The ask includes C$10M in punitive damages and a "wide injunction" reaching songs that "do not yet exist." Seven days later, Suno launched v6, "trained from scratch" on licensed music from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and retired every old model the same day. My take: the licence is a confession. You can't retire the models built on scraped data, launch one built on permission, and then tell a Toronto court that permission was never required. And retiring the model doesn't retire the outputs — those "covers" are still streaming today. Meanwhile, a master licence signed in New York doesn't buy a performing licence for the composition in Canada. Writers should be asking where their cut is. Why Toronto should worry Suno more than Boston: no fair use, no text-and-data-mining exception, and a closed list of fair-dealing purposes that doesn't include "billion-dollar streaming service." New Gavel Drop episode of Music Row Dealmakers — full breakdown, ~30 minutes. Link in the comments. General information, not legal advice. https://youtu.be/-Rzabc72CMY #MusicLaw #AICopyright #SOCAN #Suno #AIMusic #MusicBusiness #Songwriters #PerformingRights #MusicPublishing #WarnerMusic #BMG #EntertainmentLaw #Nashville #MusicRow #MusicRowDealmakers #GavelDrop #IntellectualProperty #Copyright