Google Trained Lyria 3 on 44 Million Copyrighted Clips, Indie Artists Allege in 118-Page Lawsuit

Indie artists filed a 118-page lawsuit against Google on March 6, alleging the company trained its Lyria 3 music generation model on 44 million copyrighted clips and 280,000 hours of music pulled from YouTube — without permission, without compensation, and with full knowledge of the legal exposure. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, names Google as the sole defendant and is structured as a proposed class action. The legal filing puts Google in an awkward position: it has the infrastructure to clear music rights at scale, chose not to use it, and has Google's own published research papers documenting exactly what it did.

The plaintiffs — a roster of independent musicians and songwriters including New York-based Sam Kogon, Chicago band Directrix, Atlanta songwriter and producer Michael Mell, and Los Angeles composer Magnus Fiennes — argue that Google's position is structurally indefensible. Google owns YouTube, operates Content ID (the platform's rights management system that artists and labels rely on to police unauthorized use), and maintains a database of over 50 million reference files provided by rights holders with full metadata. "Google had every opportunity to develop this product legally," the filing states. "It has the technical infrastructure, financial resources, and industry connections to clear rights before training."

The lawsuit cites two Google research papers as evidence. A 2022 paper published under the names of Google researchers described extracting roughly 44 million clips — representing nearly 370,000 hours of recorded music — from 50 million internet music videos. A 2023 paper documented a separate training run on 5 million clips totaling 280,000 hours of audio. "Both papers were published in peer-reviewed venues under the names of Google researchers. Neither mentions a license. Neither discusses a consent mechanism. Neither identifies a single rights holder whose permission was sought," the lawsuit states.

The timing matters. Google developed MusicLM — the predecessor to Lyria — in 2023 but initially withheld the model from public release, citing concerns about cultural appropriation and misappropriation of creative content. Google released MusicLM publicly in May 2023. The company launched Lyria 3 on February 18 through the Gemini app, making the model available to more than 750 million monthly active users. Lyria 3 generates up to 30-second audio clips from text prompts or images. The lawsuit was filed six weeks later.

Google has not specified how Lyria 3 was trained. In a blog post announcing the launch, Senior Product Managers Joel Yawili (Gemini App) and Myriam Hamed Torres (Google DeepMind) said the company had "been very thoughtful of copyright and partner agreements" and that Lyria 3 was trained on music Google "has the right to use" under its terms of service, partner agreements, and applicable law. The plaintiffs dispute that framing directly.

The case also draws an unflattering contrast with how Google has handled the same legal risk from AI startups. Udio, one of the two main AI music generation companies alongside Suno, was founded by four former Google DeepMind researchers: David Ding, Charlie Nash, Conor Durkan, and Yaroslav Ganin. The lawsuit notes that within months of leaving Google, all four launched Udio, "another AI music-generation service trained on copyrighted recordings without authorization." Udio has since settled with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, and signed licensing agreements with independent label Merlin. Suno, valued at $2.45 billion, reached a separate settlement with Warner. Only Sony Music has ongoing litigation against both startups. The plaintiffs in this case (except Kogon) previously sued Udio.

Google's response to Lyria 3's competitive landscape has been to acquire. Days after the February 18 launch, Google announced it was acquiring ProducerAI — the AI music creation platform formerly known as Riffusion — and folding it into Google Labs. ProducerAI uses Lyria 3 and positions itself as a "collaborative" creative tool. Google Labs senior director of product management Elias Roman described it as a platform where users "communicate with the AI model more like it's a collaboration partner."

The lawsuit charges Google with copyright infringement on sound recordings and compositions, removal of copyright management information, circumvention of technological access controls, false endorsement under the Lanham Act, and several Illinois-specific privacy and consumer protection claims, including alleged violations of the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act. The scope of the legal exposure is significant: the same infrastructure Google used to train Lyria 3 also gave it the ability to license that music properly, and chose not to.

The case now goes to a federal court in Chicago. The precedent from Judge William Alsup's ruling last year — that training on copyrighted data is legal but pirating it is not — will likely be central to the argument. Google's own research papers, which describe the training pipeline in enough detail to reconstruct it, may be the plaintiffs' most potent evidence. They didn't need to infer what Google did. Google told them.