On August 21, Professor Ivan Demuro (Catholic University), lawyer Maria Paola Pinna, and Professor Fabio Perrone(Academia Cremonensis) will be guests at the “Lo Quarter” Conference Hall in Alghero for the conference “Artistic and Musical Creation in the AI Era: No Improvisation!”

The event, organized by the “G. Verdi” Artistic and Musical Institute of the Catalan city and supported by the Municipality and Fondazione Alghero, the Porto Conte Park and Academia Cremonensis, aims to explore the phenomenon of generative artificial intelligence, which since 2022 has been raising major legal and economic concerns, including in the artistic and musical sectors.

The main issues include copyright infringement through the use of protected works to train AI models, job losses for human creatives, the spread of misinformation and the devaluation of original artistic work.

In this context, a landmark development is the recent ruling issued on July 31, 2026, by a German regional court in a case involving two major players: Suno, one of the most widely used generative AI platforms for music creation, and Gema, the German copyright collecting society, equivalent to Italy’s SIAE.

The German court ruled against US-based Suno for the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. The Munich ruling established an important precedent regarding the relationship between AI training and music copyright.

As lawyer Luca Guidobaldi, counsel at Advant Nctm, explained, “The German court established several principles that could have an impact on the development of AI platforms: training models on protected works, storing those works and subsequently using them require authorization from the rights holders, even when the training takes place outside the European Union.”

“According to Gema,” Guidobaldi added, “through simple prompts, including purely textual ones, Suno was able to generate musical compositions extremely similar, if not virtually identical, to some of the most famous and economically valuable songs in its repertoire, including Forever Young by Alphaville and Mambo No. 5 by Lou Bega.”

Based on this evidence, Gema argued that Suno’s AI model must necessarily have been trained on those songs, effectively “listening” to them in order to learn how to reproduce at least some of their characteristics. According to the collecting society, the model had also retained copies of the works, making them available during the generation of new songs requested by users.

For this reason, the Munich court ordered Suno to cease any future use of the works without appropriate authorization or a license issued by Gema, potentially subject to the payment of royalties. It also required the platform to provide all documentation concerning past uses of the songs and the revenues generated from them.

The reasoning adopted by the court could also, by analogy, be extended to other and more complex forms of artistic expression, such as films and audiovisual works.

“As far as Italy is concerned,” Guidobaldi concluded, “there are still relatively few legal disputes involving generative artificial intelligence, and only some of them have been made public. However, it is reasonable to expect that the approach taken by the German courts could also influence Italy, potentially leading to new litigation but also to new agreements between rights holders and AI companies.”