Canada's music rights body SOCAN has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music generator Suno in the Federal Court of Canada, becoming the third collecting society worldwide to take legal action against the company. Unlike previous cases brought by Germany's GEMA (which won its case in July) and Denmark's Koda (still ongoing), which focused on the songs used to train Suno's AI model, SOCAN's case targets the outputs the platform generates and streams to Canadian users, arguing these often closely replicate existing copyrighted works.

The lawsuit cites 150 Suno-generated tracks that SOCAN says are identical or substantially similar to songs in its repertoire, including near-exact recreations of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" (the latter reworked with Korean lyrics). SOCAN is seeking damages and profits to be determined at trial, or alternatively statutory damages of up to CAD $20,000 per song (around CAD $2.74 million total), plus CAD $10 million in punitive damages, while also requesting a broad injunction covering its entire catalogue of Canadian and internationally licensed music.