Whose Distribution

On the thirty-first of July 2026 the Munich Regional Court heard the claim brought against Suno by GEMA, the German authors’ society. Judge Elke Schwager examined six songs, and among them were Boney M’s “Rasputin” and “Daddy Cool”, which once spun in my player, and “Mambo No. 5”. Experts compared what the model had learned on with what it puts out, and the court wrote in its ruling that these works are reproducibly contained in Suno’s version three-and-a-half and version four models, and that coincidence is ruled out given the complexity and length of the music. The court prohibited Suno from doing this, held it liable for damages and obliged it to disclose the information from which those damages could be calculated. Suno replied that the ruling rests on a misunderstanding of how its technology works and that the company is considering an appeal.

The German producer Frank Farian put Boney M together in the studio in the seventies, sang the male parts on the recordings himself and sent other people out on stage. Farian was generally relaxed about the question of who was really singing. In the late eighties he put together the duo Milli Vanilli, in which two dancers, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, mouthed along to the voices of hired session singers. The album Girl You Know It’s True topped the American chart for eight weeks, and in February 1990 the duo won the Grammy for Best New Artist, although the trick had come out even earlier, on the twenty-first of July 1989 at a concert in Bristol, Connecticut, when the backing tape jammed and started repeating the same line. In November 1990 Farian admitted everything himself, and the Recording Academy, for the first and only time in its history, took a Grammy back. About ten million buyers of the album were entitled to a refund, but by some counts around fifty people applied for one. The public, it seems, cared about how a song sounded and cared much less about who had sung it.