Variety reported that Suno lost its case to the German collecting society GEMA on 31 July, with the decision requiring AI companies to pay for the systematic use of GEMA's repertoire and its commercial exploitation. The requirement covers both model training and output generation, and GEMA's leadership framed the outcome as a finding that models built on unlicensed material enjoy no protection in law.
Music Week reported that damages against Suno have yet to be determined, with the amount to follow once the company discloses the relevant figures. GEMA, which represents more than 100,000 composers, lyricists and music publishers in Germany, welcomed the court's willingness to rule on the United States legal position so that the action could be brought in Munich irrespective of where the training itself took place.
Regulation
The European Commission announced on 31 July 2026 that its AI Office, together with national authorities, would begin enforcing the AI Act from 2 August. The same date brought the transparency rules into application, requiring chatbots and other interactive systems to tell users they are dealing with AI rather than a human, deepfakes to be labelled, and AI-generated or altered content to carry machine-readable marks so it can be detected.
The European Commission published the first list of signatories to the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content, with about 190 organisations signed by the end of July 2026. The code has been assessed as adequate by both the Commission and the AI Board and offers signatories a streamlined route to demonstrate compliance regardless of where they operate, with Section 1 signatories including Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, Black Forest Labs, Cohere, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, OpenAI and Synthesia, and Section 2 including Bulgari, Fastweb, Getty Images, Iberdrola, Lenovo and Lufthansa. About half of the signatories are small and recently established companies.
Cases
Via the press release of the Landgericht München I in GEMA v Suno, it can be seen that the 42nd Civil Chamber largely granted GEMA's claims for injunctive relief, disclosure and damages by judgment of 31 July 2026 in case 42 O 763/25. The court found that six works, among them 'Atemlos durch die Nacht', 'Rasputin' and 'Daddy Cool', were memorised in the defendant's v3.5 and v4 models held on servers in Germany, that this storage infringed the reproduction right under section 16 UrhG and was not covered by the text and data mining exception in section 44b UrhG, and that the outputs reproduced recognisable original elements for which Suno rather than the prompting user was responsible. It held that it had international jurisdiction under section 131 VGG over the United States training acts, that under the protecting country principle US law applied to those acts, and that the reproductions were not covered by fair use under 17 U.S.C. section 107, distinguishing Bartz and Kadrey on the ground that in those cases the training data was not substantially made accessible to users in the outputs. The judgment records that the training copies were obtained by stream-ripping from YouTube in circumvention of the rolling cipher protection measure, and it is not final.
Academia
arXiv hosts 'Regulating for AI Legitimacy' by Gilad Abiri, submitted on 27 July 2026. The article argues that legitimacy is an autonomous regulatory objective distinct from alignment, contending that asking whether a system pursues the right objectives safely cannot answer the prior question of by what right those objectives are set and enforced, and drawing on the social media precedent to show that performance gains do not by themselves generate accepted authority.
arXiv hosts 'AI Deployment and Cyber Governance Failures in Public-Sector Organizations: A Typological Analysis' by Md Salahuddin, James Rooney and Fida Hasan, submitted on 28 July 2026. The paper proposes a seven-domain typology of AI-driven cyber governance failures in government bodies and tests five frameworks against it, including the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001, finding that none addresses shadow AI, speed asymmetry or governance vacuum at the operational specificity the public sector requires.
Events
Minnesota CLE will hold the 2026 AI and the Law Conference in Minneapolis on 9 and 10 November 2026, with an online replay on 3 and 4 December. The third annual programme covers legal developments, tools and models and real-world use in practice, carries 9.0 CLE credits and 9.0 IAPP CPE credits, and offers an early registration discount until 31 August 2026.
Sources: Variety, Music Week, European Commission, DATEV, arXiv, Minnesota CLE