Poseidon Wave Media sues Black Forest Labs, alleging FLUX was trained on The American Dollar's recordings

What happened

Poseidon Wave Media LLC has sued Black Forest Labs Inc. in the Eastern District of New York, alleging that the company copied 236 instrumental sound recordings and compositions by the band The American Dollar to train its FLUX generative AI platform. The suit was filed on 20 October 2026 as No. 1:26-cv-06737, and the operative pleading is an amended complaint filed 22 October 2026.

The works and the allegations

Poseidon says it owns, by assignment, the 236 tracks, which are covered by 164 U.S. copyright registrations. The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that Black Forest Labs acquired many of the tracks by stream-ripping them from YouTube and Spotify, using a tool such as yt-dlp to circumvent YouTube's rolling cipher encryption, and then ingested and reverse-engineered them to train FLUX. It alleges that the multimodal FLUX.3 model, released in early access on 23 July 2026, generates videos with audio.

To support the copying allegation, the complaint describes 34 test prompts run on FLUX.3 by a band member: 30 asking for a video with a song sounding like a named American Dollar track, three control prompts naming songs by other famous artists, and one gibberish prompt. Poseidon says each output closely resembled the targeted track. The complaint does not presently allege that the outputs themselves infringe, unless discovery shows they recapture portions of the tracks; it offers the outputs as evidence that the tracks were copied and trained on.

The claims

The amended complaint pleads four counts: copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. 106(1), alleged to be wilful; a New York trade secret claim; a federal trade secret claim under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. 1836, on the theory that the band's methods for making its music were reverse engineered; and DMCA anti-circumvention under 17 U.S.C. 1201(a) for allegedly bypassing technological measures used by YouTube, Spotify and others. Poseidon seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, plus other relief.

Context

Poseidon earlier sued Suno, Inc. over the same 236 tracks (No. 1:26-cv-03921, S.D.N.Y., filed 12 May 2026) and voluntarily dismissed that case with prejudice on 3 August 2026. Unlike the record labels' suits against music generators such as Suno, this case targets a company better known for image and video models, now that its models also generate audio. The allegations have not been tested in court, and no response from Black Forest Labs had been reported in the sources reviewed.