Black Forest Labs Sued in New York Over Music Allegedly Used to Train FLUX
Photo: Reynaldo Yodia / Pexels
Black Forest Labs, the company behind the FLUX image and video models, is facing a copyright lawsuit in the US over music. Poseidon Wave Media LLC, the rights-holding company of the instrumental band The American Dollar, filed suit on 20 October 2026 in the Eastern District of New York (No. 1:26-cv-06737), according to the court docket, and filed an amended complaint on 22 October. The complaint itself is not on the free public docket; the details below come from summaries of the amended complaint.
What the complaint alleges
Poseidon says it owns, by assignment, 236 instrumental recordings and compositions covered by 164 US copyright registrations. It alleges that Black Forest Labs Inc., described as the US arm of a German parent based in Freiburg, copied these tracks to train FLUX, and in particular the multimodal FLUX.3 model that generates video with audio.
The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that many tracks were obtained by stream-ripping them from YouTube and Spotify with a tool such as yt-dlp. To support its claim of copying, it describes 34 test prompts run by a band member on FLUX.3: 30 asked for a video with a song sounding like a named American Dollar track, three were control prompts naming songs by other famous artists, and one was gibberish. Poseidon says the outputs closely resembled the targeted tracks.
Notably, the amended complaint says Poseidon is not, for now, claiming that the outputs themselves infringe. It offers them as evidence that the training data included its music.
Four claims
The amended complaint pleads:
- Copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 106(1), for reproducing the tracks, alleged to be wilful.
- Anti-circumvention under the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), for allegedly bypassing technical measures used by YouTube, Spotify and others.
- Trade secret claims under New York law and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. § 1836), on the theory that the band's methods for making its music were reverse engineered.
Poseidon seeks statutory damages of up to USD 150,000 per work, plus other relief. The allegations have not been tested, and no response from Black Forest Labs had been reported in the sources reviewed.
Why it matters
Unlike the record labels' suits against music generators such as Suno, this one goes after a company better known for images and video, now that its models generate audio too. The DMCA anti-circumvention claim is based on how the data was collected rather than on what the model produces. The trade secret theory is less conventional and may face more resistance. For AI developers, the case is another reason to document where training data came from and how it was obtained.
Sources
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