What did Elvis Presley's estate and Eminem's publisher file?
Elvis Presley Enterprises, ABG EPE IP and a group of co-plaintiffs filed a 51-page complaint against Suno on Nov. 6, 2026. The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under docket number 3:26-cv-13398. The same night, Eight Mile Style filed a separate 32-page complaint in the same court.
The two cases are separate, and they do not share a plaintiff. Eight Mile Style is the Ferndale, Michigan, publisher that owns or administers most of Eminem's catalog. Eminem is not personally a plaintiff, according to Variety, and a representative for the rapper did not comment. The same four attorneys, Richard Busch, Mark Block, David Niemierzycki and Andrew Davis, filed both complaints.
The Presley side is a coalition rather than a single estate entity. Plaintiffs include Elvis Presley Enterprises, ABG EPE IP, the Luigi Creatore Trust, the Susan T. Aberbach trust, Raleigh Music Publishing and several individual rights holders. Elvis Presley Enterprises is part of Authentic Brands Group, the licensing company behind Presley's name and image rights.
Both complaints seek injunctions and a full accounting of training data and scraping activity. They also ask the court to order the impoundment or destruction of unauthorized copies held in datasets and model weights. The Presley filing goes further. It asks for the destruction of "plates, molds, matrices, masters, tapes, memory chips and drives." No court response from Suno had been reported when this article was published.
What does the Elvis lawsuit allege about Suno?
The Presley complaint accuses Suno of four kinds of conduct. It alleges violations of Tennessee's ELVIS Act, violations of Tennessee common-law publicity rights, direct copyright infringement and circumvention of access controls. It also alleges that Suno stripped copyright management information from the works it copied.
The core factual claim is that Suno's service reproduces Presley's voice on demand. The filing points to an 84-song "Elvis" playlist on Suno. It says that entering a musician's name in the Create function generates output based on that person's identity. One track, described as "Elvis Presley - Blue Suede Sin Medley," is a 7:11 medley. The complaint says it draws on "Can't Help Falling in Love," "All Shook Up" and "Don't Be Cruel."
The complaint also cites a cover of "Can't Help Falling in Love." It says the song is Presley's highest-streaming track on Spotify, with more than 1.42 billion streams. And it points to a paid "Voices" feature that, according to the filing, lets users save a vocal style and reuse it. One saved voice in the exhibits is labeled "Elvis."
The estate's lawyers argue that this is not a case of users misbehaving. "Entering a musician's name into Suno's 'Create' function, such as Elvis', causes Suno to generate unauthorized output," Busch writes. The complaint says Suno, not its users, built a system that turns a name into a recognizable performance.
The language is unusually sharp for a commercial complaint. Suno "mechanically encoded itself with artists' identities," the filing says, and "harnessed them all for a consistent conveyor belt of cold hard cash." It warns that "the next Elvis won't pick up a guitar." Billboard also quoted the estate's claim that "all of the humanity, history, despair, and triumph that constitutes Elvis' identity was stolen and is stored on servers."
Why sue over voice when the songs are already copyrighted? The estate's answer is that the two rights protect different things. Copyright covers the compositions and recordings themselves, while publicity law covers the commercial value of Presley's identity. A synthetic vocal that sounds like Presley but performs new words may fall outside the copyright in any particular song. The ELVIS Act claim is designed to reach that gap.
The money is large. The complaint identifies 859 works in Exhibit F and asks for $150,000 per willfully infringed work, or $128.85 million. It adds $2.15 million for alleged circumvention under Section 1201 and $21.48 million for alleged removal of copyright management information under Section 1202. Those figures total about $152.5 million. The filing separately seeks actual damages, Suno's profits and treble damages on the publicity claims, with no stated ceiling.
None of this has been proven. A complaint is a set of allegations, and Suno has not yet answered. The damages are requests, not awards, and the court has not ruled on whether the ELVIS Act applies to this service.
How does Tennessee's ELVIS Act work?
Tennessee enacted the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act on March 21, 2024. The law took effect on July 1, 2024, and amended the state's 1984 Personal Rights Protection Act. It added "voice" to the protected attributes of name, photograph and likeness. Voice is defined to include a sound that is "readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual," even when it is a simulation.
The bigger change is who can be sued. The Act creates liability for publishing or transmitting a person's voice or likeness with knowledge that the use was unauthorized. It also reaches companies that distribute an algorithm, tool or service whose "primary purpose or function" is producing a particular person's voice or likeness. That provision is aimed at AI developers, not only at their users.
The new claims do not carry the old commercial-advertising requirement. Latham & Watkins noted in a 2024 analysis that this could expand liability well beyond ads and merchandise. The firm also flagged two limits that will matter here. Federal copyright law may preempt state claims, and the First Amendment will apply.
Remedies include injunctions, destruction of materials, actual damages and profits. Tennessee's publicity right also survives death. Rothman's Roadmap, a state-by-state guide, says the postmortem period runs ten years. It can continue while the identity is still commercially exploited. Presley's estate has exploited his identity continuously since his death, and the complaint leans on that history.
The choice of law is unusual. The suit was filed in California, and Suno is a Massachusetts company. The complaint asks a California federal court to apply Tennessee law because Presley was domiciled there when he died. That argument may be contested, and the answer will shape which claims survive.
Why is Eminem's publisher suing separately?
Eight Mile Style's case is a copyright case, not a voice-cloning case. The publisher owns or administers nearly 270 Eminem compositions, including "Lose Yourself," "Without Me," "Stan" and "The Real Slim Shady." Its complaint covers 269 of those songs.
The damages follow a statutory formula. Eight Mile Style seeks $150,000 for each of the 269 songs, or $40.35 million. It adds $672,000 for alleged removal of copyright management information. That puts the total above $41 million, as the Detroit Free Press reported.
The complaint alleges direct infringement, circumvention of technological measures and removal of copyright management information. It cites a Suno-generated track called "Slim shady x Rosefalls" that used an AI image of Eminem as cover art. The filing says the vocals were "clearly derived from Eminem's actual voice." It also cites outputs that reproduced lyrics from "Lose Yourself" and "The Real Slim Shady."
Eight Mile Style argues that Suno's guardrails are easy to bypass. Suno blocks the word "Eminem" as a prompt, the publisher acknowledges. But the complaint says a user can ask for "aggressive rap, rapid-fire flow, dark humor, male rapper, horrorcore" and similar terms. It says that produces a result in the style of "Slim Shady" without naming the artist.
The scraping allegations may be the most consequential part. The complaint quotes Suno's earlier court admission. According to the filing, Suno said it copied "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet." The complaint also relies on 404 Media's reporting on leaked Suno source code. That reporting described scraping from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius. The filing cites 2,057,486 artist records, 6,980,653 lyric pages and roughly 113,879 hours of audio.
The distinction matters because Eight Mile Style is a publisher, not a label. It controls the compositions, meaning the lyrics and musical work, rather than the master recordings. That is why the publisher focuses on lyrics and melodies rather than on vocal likeness. UMG, Eminem's record company, is not part of this suit. It remains a plaintiff in the labels' separate litigation against Suno.
What does Suno say about the allegations?
Suno denies the core allegation. "Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone's name or likeness," a spokesperson said in a statement to Billboard, CBS and the Detroit Free Press. The company says it blocks prompts for specific artists and songs. It also says it uses third-party screening for uploaded audio and lyrics.
The company made a broader legal argument in the Isbell case. Its attorney, Andrew Gass, wrote that artist names are often shorthand for genres. "When people describe styles of music, they often use artists' names as shorthand for the genre they perform in," he wrote. "There is nothing unlawful about that."
Suno also argues that the claims would create a state intellectual-property regime that conflicts with federal copyright law. It invokes the First Amendment as well. The company moved to dismiss the Isbell class action on Nov. 3. A ruling in that case could shape how the new complaints proceed, because the same theories are in play.
Suno has not publicly responded to the Presley or Eight Mile Style complaints beyond its general statement. That statement does not address the specific outputs described in either filing.
What are the weak points in the lawsuits?
The first weakness is proof. The complaints describe outputs that sound like Presley or Eminem. But the plaintiffs must show that Suno's model reproduces protected expression or an identifiable voice. Style and genre are not copyrightable, and imitating a style is generally lawful.
The ELVIS Act is new and largely untested. Courts have not settled how broadly its "primary purpose or function" language reaches. They have also not decided whether it survives First Amendment scrutiny. Latham & Watkins called that phrase unclear when the law passed. Suno's preemption argument, if accepted, would narrow the statute's reach.
The Presley case also depends on postmortem publicity rights. Tennessee's statute sets a ten-year postmortem term and lets the right continue while the identity is still exploited. The estate's licensing record is strong, but the issue is litigable. The complaint pairs the statutory claim with a common-law claim as a fallback.
The choice-of-law question is another risk. A California court may not apply Tennessee's statute to a Massachusetts company's nationwide product. If it does not, the voice-cloning claims lose their most favorable legal theory, and the case narrows to copyright.
Finally, Suno says its current v6 model was trained on licensed music. The company released v6 in September with deals from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. That does not erase claims about earlier models, and UMG and Sony dispute the licensing story. But it complicates any request to shut down the current service.
The requested remedies would be operationally significant. The complaints ask for the destruction of copies held in training datasets and model weights. They also seek a complete accounting of scraping. If a court granted those requests, Suno would have to document its pipeline. It might also have to rebuild parts of it. That prospect gives the plaintiffs leverage even before a trial.
What happens next for AI music?
The new filings land in a crowded docket. The major labels sued Suno in June 2024. Warner Music Group settled and later partnered with the company. Universal and Sony are still litigating and filed a second suit over v6 in September. Publishers Round Hill and Reservoir have also sued, and the Isbell class action covers artists' publicity claims.
Suno has continued to raise money during the litigation. It raised more than $400 million in June at a $5.4 billion valuation, according to Variety. The Presley complaint says the service has more than 100 million users and 2 million paid subscribers. Those figures come from the plaintiff, not from Suno's audited accounts.
The immediate steps are procedural. Suno will answer or move to dismiss both complaints. The court will decide whether the cases proceed together and how discovery into training data will work. Any ruling on the Isbell motion will be an early signal about the strength of the publicity theories.
The wider question is whether voice becomes a licensed asset. The ELVIS Act does not ban voice cloning. It gives artists and estates a right to authorize or refuse it. If the Presley case succeeds, estates gain leverage to negotiate licensing deals. If it fails, the industry may rely on copyright and contract instead.
For now, two of music's most valuable catalogs have turned a tech-policy debate into a federal lawsuit. The filings are public, the allegations are detailed, and Suno's response will be the next document that matters.