Photo Credit: Igor Omilaev
Udio is facing continued pressure from Sony Music to publicly disclose its “training number,” which the major label maintains “provides necessary context” about the AI platform’s alleged use of protected recordings.
Sony Music, the lone major still litigating against Udio, pinpointed that figure – referring to the total number of tracks allegedly ingested to train the relevant audio-generation models – during an involved discovery process.
But as things stand, the tally has been redacted from public versions of the case’s filings, and Udio (plus Suno in a separate-but-similar dispute) is fighting to keep it that way. Though hindsight is 20/20, it’s unclear whether this strategy was advisable for the companies.
While there’s probably a good reason for battling to keep the specific counts under wraps, it’s not a secret that each of the platforms has trained on many works; Suno and Udio alike have acknowledged as much.
And in practice, their redactions push is having the presumably unintended effect of piquing public interest in the hard totals.
Capitalizing on this reality, Sony Music in a new memorandum expanded on its position that the same public needs to know Udio’s training number to fully understand the alleged infringement’s scope.
“It speaks directly to the nature and extent of Udio’s copying, and provides context for Plaintiffs’ allegations by demonstrating that Udio’s sweeping disregard for copyright ownership extends far beyond the specific works asserted in this case,” Sony Music wrote of Udio’s training number. “The public is entitled to understand the scope of that conduct in full.”
As for the argument that divulging the total would give Udio’s rivals an advantage, the defendant allegedly failed to “explain how any competitor could ‘develop,’ ‘refine,’ or ‘measure’ their own models based on a single number that simply identifies the total count of audio files,” per the plaintiff.
“The Training Data Number, by contrast, is a single aggregate number that reveals nothing about Udio’s training processes, systems, or methodologies; it speaks only to the scale of Udio’s copying,” Sony Music added for good measure.
Now, all eyes are on the judge’s sealing decision here and in the Suno infringement action, which Sony Music is spearheading alongside Universal Music. Wherever the cards fall – and we’ll likely learn the training totals one way or another at some point – it’s safe to say that the current episode has placed the numbers squarely in the media spotlight.
