What copyright protects in a song, and what it doesn't: a guide for the AI 'sounds like' era

This is general information about US law, written for musicians. It is not legal advice. If a release or a dispute depends on it, talk to a music lawyer.

"It sounds like" is how most music disputes start, and it is not a legal test. Over the past four years US courts have been unusually consistent about where the line sits, and the AI era makes that line more useful to know, not less. Here is the short version: you can own a melody and an original combination of musical choices. You can't own a scale, a common chord progression, a rhythm, a genre's clichés or a style. And the thing an AI tool can copy most convincingly, a singer's voice, isn't a copyright question at all.

What does copyright actually protect in a song?

Original expression. In Gray v. Hudson, the Ninth Circuit drew the distinction that matters most for producers: a melody is more than a sequence of pitches. It has to be rhythmically organised into an "esthetic whole". An eight-note melody may be copyrightable, the court said, but the abstract eight-note pitch sequence inside it is not.

The second route to protection is combination. Elements that are unprotectable on their own can be protected together, but only if their "selection and arrangement" is original in some way. Trivial or "practically inevitable" arrangements don't qualify.

What did the Katy Perry case decide?

A jury had found that the repeating instrumental figure in "Dark Horse" (2013) copied an ostinato in "Joyful Noise" (2008) by Christian hip-hop artist Flame and his co-writers and awarded about $2.8 million. The trial judge threw the verdict out, and on 10 March 2022 the Ninth Circuit agreed: both ostinatos "consist entirely of commonplace musical elements", and their similarities didn't come from an original combination of them. The opinion lists what nobody owns: the minor scale, and eight even notes in a row. We covered the ruling at the time.

What did the Ed Sheeran cases decide?

Chords and rhythm are building blocks too. Structured Asset Sales, which owns part of the copyright in Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On", said "Thinking Out Loud" copied it. The Second Circuit disagreed in November 2024: in the court's words as quoted by Copyright Lately, the four-chord progression, "even coupled with a syncopated harmonic rhythm, is too well-explored" to meet the originality threshold, and protecting it "risks granting a monopoly over a combination of two fundamental musical building blocks". The court also held that for a pre-1978 song only the deposited sheet music counts, so the record's bass line was out. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in June 2025, Authors Alliance reported. Our earlier post has the detail.

What do the Mariah Carey and "Levitating" suits add?

Two more lessons. First, genre conventions don't belong to whoever used them first. Andy Stone, who performs as Vince Vance, and co-writer Troy Powers sought $20 million, claiming Carey's 1994 "All I Want for Christmas Is You" copied their earlier country song of the same name. In March 2025 a federal judge in Los Angeles granted Carey summary judgment, the AP reported, siding with defence experts who said both songs drew on Christmas clichés older than either, used differently. The judge also sanctioned the plaintiffs and their lawyers, and later reports put Carey's share of the fees at $92,300.

Second, a claim needs copying, not just similarity, and that usually means proving access. In June 2023 a judge dismissed Artikal Sound System's claim that Dua Lipa's "Levitating" copied its 2017 track "Live Your Life", Music Business Worldwide reported, because the band hadn't shown the writers could have heard it: several hundred CD sales and live shows, mostly in Florida, weren't wide dissemination. The band was allowed to amend, and we haven't confirmed what happened next.

What about style, and what about voice?

The Copyright Office's 2024 report on digital replicas is blunt: copyright "does not protect artistic style as a separate element of a work", and the Office declined to recommend adding style to a federal replica law. It notes that state publicity law may protect a style closely identified with a performer.

Voice sits outside copyright too. The report cites Midler v. Ford: "A voice is not copyrightable." The same case held that deliberately imitating a professional singer's distinctive, widely known voice to sell a product is a wrong under California common law. Federal copyright law also shields soundalike recordings and vocal imitations from infringement claims, and the Office asked Congress to make clear that this doesn't strip anyone of rights in their own voice. That is why the live fights are under publicity law: Tennessee's ELVIS Act, the stalled NO FAKES Act and the Isbell suit against Suno.

And the music you make with AI?

The Office's 2025 copyrightability report concludes that prompts alone don't give enough control to make you the author of the output. What you can protect is your own expression that's perceptible in the result, plus your creative selection, arrangement or modification of AI material. So the rule that limits your claims against others also limits what you can claim in a generated track.

A do and don't table for reference tracks and AI tools

What we think

These rulings are good news for working musicians, and they don't amount to a free pass for AI. The building-blocks cases protect the shared vocabulary every songwriter uses. For a while after the 2015 "Blurred Lines" case, anyone writing over a common progression had reason to worry. They have less now.

But the same doctrine cuts against artists in the AI fight. If style and vibe are free, a model that makes "a track like yours" without copying a melody gives you no copyright claim. The protection that's left is identity, and for most musicians that depends on which state they live in. That's why a federal voice right matters more to working artists than any new melody case.

Two second-order effects for producers. Access, the hurdle that sank the "Levitating" claim, protects much less when a model has been trained on a vast catalogue, and we expect plaintiffs to argue that training is access. In Germany a Munich court has already found, in a ruling that isn't final, that six songs were reproducibly contained in Suno's models (our coverage). And because only human contribution is protectable, your session history is your evidence. Tools that keep every layer editable, such as Veena, a browser AI DAW that builds a track with you layer by layer and exports stems and MIDI, make that record easy to keep. Whatever you use, keep the project files, not just the bounce.

Sources

• US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Gray v. Hudson, No. 20-55401, opinion (10 Mar 2022)
• Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center, Gray v. Hudson
• Authors Alliance, Bonds, Beats, and Lawsuits: How Ed Sheeran Won (23 Jun 2025)
• Copyright Lately, Ed Sheeran Wins Copyright Appeal: 5 Things to Know (3 Nov 2024)
• Associated Press via Boston.com, Judge: Mariah Carey didn't steal 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' (20 Mar 2025)
• Fox 11, $20 million 'Christmas' lawsuit against Mariah Carey dismissed
• Music Business Worldwide, Dua Lipa 'Levitating' copyright infringement lawsuit dismissed (7 Jun 2023)
• US Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
• US Copyright Office, Part 1: Digital Replicas (31 Jul 2024)
• US Copyright Office, Part 2: Copyrightability (29 Jan 2025)
• Landgericht München I, press release on GEMA v. SUNO (31 Jul 2026)
• Veena Studio, Veena