On September 3, Suno’s new Terms of Service went live. On September 22, we published a detailed analysis of what those terms actually said — the perpetual and irrevocable licence on user content and voice, the moral rights waiver, the self-declared “sufficient compensation” clause, the arbitration requirement in Massachusetts, and the indemnification provision that makes users responsible for Suno’s legal defence costs if things go wrong. We were not the only ones paying attention.
Today, October 6, Italy’s competition authority — the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, or AGCM — announced it has opened a formal investigation into Suno’s terms of service, citing multiple provisions it believes “may be unfair pursuant to Article 33 of the Consumer Code” because they “may create a significant imbalance in the rights and obligations under the contract, to the detriment of consumers.” The list of concerns the AGCM published reads like a summary of our September piece, with the addition of a formal legal framework and the word “investigation.”
What the AGCM Is Actually Saying
The authority’s concerns fall into five distinct categories, each pointing to a different clause in Suno’s terms.
- First, price changes and account terminations: the AGCM notes that the terms appear to give Suno “broad discretion to make unilateral changes to the contract, the service and the subscription prices, without having to provide any justification,” and allow the company to “suspend, discontinue or terminate user accounts — as well as any associated content — at any time, for any reason and without prior notice.” This is the clause that affects every paying subscriber: you can lose your account, your content, and your subscription with no explanation and no recourse.
- Second, terms users cannot access before signing up: the AGCM says users appear to be bound by additional terms that they cannot directly access before they sign up. This is a consumer protection issue that goes beyond the music industry — it’s a basic transparency problem.
- Third, liability limitation: the terms “appear to limit the company’s liability in very broad and generic terms, including in relation to personal injury.” That last part — personal injury — is the kind of clause that appears in boilerplate legal drafting and is almost never tested, but its presence in a music platform’s terms is not, as the AGCM implies, unremarkable.
- Fourth, and most significant for anyone reading this publication, the moral rights waiver. The AGCM states that “the scope of the license imposed on consumers as a condition for using the platform services seems to be insufficiently defined, as it is framed in generic and all-encompassing terms, and imposes the waiver of moral rights contrary to Articles 20 et seq. of Law 633/1941.”
Law 633/1941 is Italy’s copyright statute. Articles 20 and following establish that moral rights — the right to be credited as the author of a work, the right to object to its distortion or misuse — are inalienable under Italian law. You cannot waive them. Not in a contract, not in a click-through agreement, not in a terms of service that went live on September 3. We noted exactly this in our September analysis: the moral rights waiver in Suno’s terms is likely unenforceable across most of Europe, including Italy, because moral rights are inalienabile under most continental legal systems. Suno included the clause anyway — either unaware of European law, or betting that most users wouldn’t know their rights. The AGCM is now betting otherwise.
Fifth, arbitration and jurisdiction: the terms “appear to require consumers to pursue claims through binding individual arbitration administered in the United States, subject to tight deadlines for doing so and a waiver of class actions”, with exclusive jurisdiction in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. For an Italian user with a dispute — say, over a terminated account or an unauthorized use of their voice model — this would mean pursuing a claim in a foreign jurisdiction under a foreign legal system, subject to tight deadlines, with no right to join a class action. The AGCM’s position is that this is not a reasonable condition to impose on a consumer.
Why Italy, Why Now
The AGCM‘s authority to investigate unfair contract terms dates from 2023, with penalties ranging from €5,000 to €10 million. The investigation was opened today, and the authority has said it will launch a public consultation “over the next few weeks,” open to trade associations, chambers of commerce, and consumer associations recognized at the national level. The AGCM did not specify which version of Suno’s terms it examined. Given the timing, it is reasonable to assume the investigation was triggered by the September 3 update — the same update that prompted Alex Tripi‘s viral Instagram reel, our own analysis, and what appears to have been a significant wave of user awareness about what those terms actually contained.
The context in which this investigation arrives matters. Suno lost a copyright case brought by German collecting society GEMA at the Munich Regional Court in July. Denmark’s collecting society Koda sued Suno in Copenhagen in November 2025. And now Italy’s consumer authority has opened a formal investigation into its terms. The pattern is consistent: Europe is not treating Suno’s legal architecture as a given.
What Could Actually Happen
The AGCM’s investigation does not automatically result in a fine or a forced change to Suno’s terms. The process involves a public consultation, then a formal proceeding, then — potentially — an order requiring modification of the offending clauses and a penalty. But the significant implication is structural rather than financial. If the AGCM rules that the moral rights waiver is unenforceable under Italian law — which it almost certainly is, given the explicit language of Law 633/1941 — and orders Suno to remove or modify it, that ruling would effectively establish that Suno’s terms as written are incompatible with Italian consumer law. Other European jurisdictions with similar moral rights protections — France, Germany, Belgium, Spain — would likely take note.
More practically: if Suno is required to operate under materially different terms in Europe than in the United States, the question of what that means for the perpetual, irrevocable licence it currently holds over European users’ content and voice models becomes considerably more complex. A licence granted under terms that a regulator has ruled unfair and illegal is not a clean legal instrument. Suno’s CEO Mikey Shulman said at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference on October 1 that the platform had moved “far beyond” its February figures of 2 million subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue, without giving new numbers. The platform is growing. The regulatory environment in which it is growing is tightening around it from multiple directions simultaneously.
The AGCM investigation is one data point. The GEMA ruling is another. The Koda lawsuit in Denmark is a third. The Sony and Universal copyright cases in Boston are a fourth. And our own September analysis — which concluded that Suno’s terms contained provisions that were likely unenforceable in Europe but included anyway — is, apparently, now exhibit A in a formal regulatory proceeding in the country where YouBeat is published. We’ll take that.
Rudy (32) currently based in Bergamo, here since 2019.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudy-cassago-522452179/