Canada’s largest music rights organization has asked the Federal Court to find that an American artificial intelligence company broke Canadian copyright law, putting the question before a judge long before Parliament has shown any sign of answering it.
The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, known as SOCAN, filed its claim against AI music generator Suno on Sept. 2, 2026, alleging the platform generated and streamed outputs that replicate songs in its repertoire. The claim cites 150 examples, including AI-generated versions of Nickelback’s “Photograph,” Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” and Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” according to The Canadian Press. The allegations have not been proven in court.
“We want to make sure people get paid when their music is being used,” SOCAN chief executive Jennifer Brown told The Canadian Press. “We don’t want to see these big platforms building on the backs of our creators and then not compensating them at all.” Brown said SOCAN had pursued licensing talks with Suno without progress.
SOCAN is seeking damages, a share of Suno’s profits or statutory damages of up to $20,000 per song, and an order to stop making infringing outputs available, according to BetaKit. Suno did not respond to requests for comment from either outlet. Court documents cited by The Canadian Press give a defendant 30 days to file a statement of defence, and 10 more if it first files a notice of intention to respond, which puts Suno’s first substantive answer in early October.
The shape of the claim is the detail most coverage has passed over. The American lawsuits against Suno, brought by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and others, turn largely on what the company fed into its models. SOCAN’s Canadian claim leads instead with performing rights, alleging infringement in outputs generated and streamed to users. Suno is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., and the only comparable Canadian case shows why that framing matters. When a group of Canadian news publishers sued OpenAI in Ontario, the company’s first move was to challenge the court’s jurisdiction, arguing that all of its commercial activity, including model training, took place outside the province. Conduct that happens on Canadian screens is harder to relocate.
Whatever Suno argues, it cannot argue fair use. “Fair use is not part of Canadian copyright law,” Halifax entertainment lawyer Matthew Gorman told The Canadian Press, noting that Canada instead has a “conceptually similar” fair dealing framework limited to specified purposes such as research and private study. Whether it stretches to cover AI training, Gorman said, is unresolved.
Suno has already lost once on related ground. The Munich Regional Court ruled largely in favour of German collecting society GEMA on July 31, rejecting a fair use defence, according to published analyses of the decision. The judgment is not final, and Suno has said it disagrees with it.
What gives the Canadian case its weight is that nothing else is deciding the issue. The Copyright Act contains no text and data mining exception. Ottawa opened a consultation on copyright and generative AI in 2023 and has produced no legislation from it. AI developers, including Canada’s own Cohere, have asked the federal government for an exception permitting training on copyrighted material without permission or payment. SOCAN campaigned publicly this year against granting one. AI Minister Evan Solomon said in 2025 that the government was waiting for copyright cases to work through the courts before making final decisions, BetaKit reported.
Ottawa is about to get what it asked for. A Federal Court judge, not Parliament, will deliver the first Canadian ruling on whether a machine trained on other people’s songs owes them anything, and whatever it says will apply to every AI company operating here, including the Canadian ones.
