Gerencia 360 says Suno copied its catalog to win the Spanish-language AI market

Suno picked up another copyright lawsuit on August 31, and this one comes with a motive attached. Gerencia 360 Music, a Burbank label that works in Regional Mexican and Latin music, says Suno copied its Spanish-language catalog in order to quickly capture a significant share of the Spanish language AI user market.

The complaint landed in the Northern District of California as case 3:26-cv-09248. It names Suno, Inc. alongside the Israeli data-scraping company Bright Data Ltd. and its US subsidiary.

Gerencia 360 is a label, a publisher, a booking agency and a management company all at once, founded by Luis del Villar around 13 years ago. Its catalog carries Adriel Favela, Cornelio Vega y su Dinastía and Noel Torres, and the filing says those songs have pulled more than six billion streams between them.

Why the Spanish-language market allegation is the part that stands out

Most of the suits filed against Suno this year argue about what the machine ate. This one argues about why.

The claim is competitive: that Suno went after a specific catalog because it wanted a specific audience, and Spanish-language music was a gap it needed filled. Regional Mexican has been one of the fastest-growing genres on US streaming for several years running. A model that can’t produce a convincing corrido is a model with a hole in it.

If the allegation sticks, it complicates the fair use defense Suno and its peers have leaned on. Fair use asks whether the new work substitutes for the old one in the market. A plaintiff who can show the defendant chose the catalog precisely to serve that catalog’s audience is arguing about market harm, which is the fourth fair use factor and the one courts weigh heaviest.

How Gerencia 360 gets to $165 million

The arithmetic is laid out plainly, which makes it easy to check.

Gerencia 360 asks for actual damages and profits or, in the alternative, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed willfully. Applied to 444 registered works, that produces $66,600,000 against Suno for direct infringement. The complaint then asks for the identical sum from Bright Data on a contributory infringement count, which means the same 444 works are counted twice across the first two claims.

Two further counts run under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against all defendants. Those cover 1,174 works and carry stated totals of $2,935,000 and $29,350,000, which is the statute’s $2,500 floor and $25,000 ceiling per violation multiplied out.

Add the four together and you get just over $165 million.

Why Bright Data is a defendant and not just a vendor

Bright Data sells what it calls ready-to-ingest petabyte-scale datasets. The complaint alleges Suno reached its works by going at YouTube and Deezer with automated scraping tools that bypassed login requirements, subscription gates and technical anti-bot defenses, and that Bright Data supplied part of that capability.

That framing matters more than the dollar figure. A DMCA anti-circumvention claim asks how the files were obtained, not what the model produced afterwards. No amount of arguing that the output is new touches it, which is why the same theory has already survived a motion to dismiss against Udio and why Suno keeps seeing it in complaint after complaint.

Naming the data supplier as a co-defendant also spreads the exposure. Bright Data is not a music company and has no catalog to license its way out of the problem with.

Richard Busch has now filed this complaint twice in three weeks

Gerencia 360 is represented by Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese, the attorney who won the Blurred Lines verdict for Marvin Gaye’s family while at King & Ballow. He is joined by Adams & Reese colleagues Mark L. Block, Andrew H. Davis and David Niemierzycki, with Skaggs Faucette LLP as local counsel.

That is the same lineup that filed two complaints for Round Hill Music on August 17, one against Suno and Bright Data, the other against Anthropic. Round Hill said at the time it had no intention of settling either.

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Suno obtained copies of Gerencia's copyrighted works by accessing these platforms, including specifically YouTube and Deezer, through automated scraping tools that bypassed login requirements, subscription gates, and technical anti-bot defenses.

The overlap between the two filings is substantial, which is the point of a template. Busch has built a complaint structure aimed at Suno and its data supplier together, and he is now running it for a second client. Expect a third.

What an independent Latin label is doing that the majors are not

Suno spent 2026 buying peace at the top of the market. Warner settled. BMG signed a global licensing deal in August covering recordings and publishing, with a new label-backed model due before the end of the year.

None of that reaches Gerencia 360, because nobody offered Gerencia 360 a deal. A Burbank independent with a Regional Mexican roster is not in the room where the majors negotiate, and its catalog was allegedly used anyway.

So it hired the lawyer who beat Robin Thicke and filed for $165 million. Independent labels have spent two years being told the majors would settle this on everyone’s behalf. This complaint is what deciding not to wait looks like, reported first by Music Business Worldwide and Digital Music News.