midi-musique.com
midi-musique.com
A generator output has no author. What you make of it afterwards does. Here is where the line runs, what you give away when you upload a file, and what to keep so you can demonstrate it.
This is the underlying rule, and it is remarkably stable on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the Copyright Office maintains that a work must be created by a human being to be protected: a purely generated output, with no human creative input, cannot be registered. In Europe you reach the same place by another route: a work is protected if it is original, meaning that it bears the imprint of its author’s personality. A machine has no personality to imprint.
The consequence is blunt and rarely spelled out: the track the generator handed you, as it stands, belongs to nobody. Not to you, not to the platform. Nothing stops another user from obtaining something very close to it, and you will have little to set against that.
That is not a reason to give these tools up. It is a reason not to stop at their output.
The moment you intervene through creative choices, something protectable appears. Not the whole track: your choices.
Three layers, one track
Raw generator output
No human author. Not protectable, and refused by some distributors.
Your writing
Structure, harmony, arrangement, lyrics. Your choices: protectable.
Your recording
Played, sung, produced. Protected as a performance and as a master.
The more the finished track owes to the top two layers and the less it owes to the first, the stronger your position — legally, and at distribution.
The MIDI file is what makes those layers possible. On audio you can rewrite nothing: you can only add on top. On MIDI the material is open, and every change you make in it is a decision that belongs to you.
The other half of the subject is less well known, and it plays out on the way in, not on the way out.
Uploading a file to a generator generally means granting it a very broad licence over that file: worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, often perpetual and irrevocable, model training included. At Suno, as of the date of this page, there is no opt-out at any subscription tier. Paying changes the rights over what comes out, not over what goes in.
Hence a simple rule, with nothing legal about it: upload only what is necessary. Handing over your song’s chord grid is not the same as handing over the entire demo, with its melody and its words. The first is usually enough to get what you are after.
If the question ever arises — a dispute, a distributor check, a filing with a collecting society — what will count is not your good faith but what you can show.
So keep, dated and filed: the original raw output, the MIDI transcription and its invoice, the score, your successive sequencer versions, your vocal and instrumental recordings, and your exchanges with the musicians. Together they tell a chronology, and a chronology is the easiest thing to demonstrate.
Our delivery has a secondary but real value here: it is a human service, dated, invoiced, and the delivered file is readable — it can be opened and compared. It is a piece of the file, not only a working tool.
None of the above exempts you from disclosure. If AI was involved, most platforms require it to be stated, and a common standard has settled in for that: DDEX, whose mention appears in the credits.
The detail of the rules, distributor by distributor and service by service, is covered in the article on distribution.
We have more than 75,000 transcribed songs, and 475,586 tracks analysed one by one. It is remarkable study material: opening a standard to understand how its bass and drums answer each other, seeing how a progression is voiced.
But let us be clear, because it matters to you: these files are our transcriptions of works that belong to their authors. Uploading them to a generator would put you in breach of the undertaking you give it — that you submit only what you hold the rights to.
Our catalogue is there to be listened to, played and studied. What you give an AI has to be your own music.
Not in copyright terms. An output with no human creative input has no author and is therefore not protectable, in the United States as in Europe. A paid subscription may assign you the exploitation rights the platform holds contractually, but that does not create a copyright where none exists.
Your creative contributions are protectable in themselves: the structure, the harmony, the arrangement, the lyrics, the performance. Protection covers what you brought, not retroactively the original output. That is why the more substantial your work, the clearer your position.
Our transcription is delivered for your use. What it describes remains the underlying work: if that work is yours, everything is simple. If it belongs to a third party, the transcription gives you no rights over it — neither to distribute it, nor to upload it to a generator.
Yes, if it was involved in the track. Platforms ask you to disclose the use, not to assess its importance, and the DDEX standard lets you state where the AI came in. Disclosing does not trigger down-ranking at Spotify; failing to disclose exposes you to removal.
The original output, the MIDI transcription and its invoice, the score, your successive sequencer versions, your recordings and your exchanges with the musicians — all of it dated. What convinces is a coherent chronology, not a statement.
This page is not legal advice and does not replace a professional opinion. It describes the state of the rules as of 20 August 2026, in a field where they move fast and differ from one country to another.