Poseidon Wave Media LLC v. Black Forest Labs Inc.

Who is suing

Poseidon Wave Media has two members, John Emanuele and Richard Cupolo. They formed the band The American Dollar in 2005 and make purely instrumental cinematic, post-rock and ambient music (¶¶ 24, 26). They have assigned their rights in 236 songs to the company, together with rights in what the complaint calls the trade-secret methods used to make them (¶¶ 22-23).

The complaint says licensing has been the company’s largest source of revenue for almost 20 years. It lists film, video game, advertising and television placements (¶¶ 27-29). It says licensing revenue has fallen by nearly 80% since Black Forest Labs launched FLUX, with a clear break at the public launch (¶ 31).

How the complaint connects music to an image company

Black Forest Labs is known mainly for image models. The complaint describes it more broadly, as building generative models for images, video, audio and robotics (¶ 33). It dates FLUX.1, a suite of text-to-image models, to 1 August 2024, and says the multimodal FLUX.3 model was released in early access on 23 July 2026 (¶¶ 35-36). According to the complaint, FLUX.3 combines image, video, audio and robotic action prediction. A user can ask for a video with music that sounds like a named song by a named band, and receive a sound-alike (¶ 37).

The complaint does not claim to know where Black Forest Labs got its training audio. It says the plaintiff “cannot identify the exact sources” but can show its songs were ingested (¶ 48). On information and belief, it alleges the songs were “stream ripped” from YouTube and Spotify, naming YT-DLP as an example of a tool that could defeat YouTube’s “rolling cipher” (¶¶ 226, 230-233). It also alleges that Black Forest Labs keeps the copies in a permanent library for future training (¶¶ 66, 223-225).

The plaintiff points to Black Forest Labs’ “Transparency Hub” page, which says it hosts training-data disclosures under California’s AB 2013 and EU AI Act documentation. The complaint says repeated requests for that documentation went unanswered (¶¶ 41-45).

The output test

The core evidence is a set of prompts run on FLUX.3. The complaint is explicit that it does not, for now, claim the outputs themselves infringe. It offers them as evidence that the songs were in the training data (¶ 80).

The queries were run by Emanuele, who co-wrote every track (¶ 91). The prompt template was “make a video with a song that sounds like [song] by the band [band]” (¶ 92). Some quoted prompts drop “a video with” (¶¶ 98, 138, 176). The complaint names the analyst only as “plaintiff” (¶ 100).

Three tracks are analyzed in detail: “Signaling Through The Flames,” “Age of Wonder” and “Anything You Synthesize” (¶¶ 106-211). The comparison is qualitative. It covers harmony, rhythm, bass, percussion, instrumentation, reverb, mood and “total system of expression” (¶ 104). Shared features include minor or major key, bass notes held for a full measure, sixteenth-note lead lines, reverberant drums, and a two-kick, two-snare drum pattern the complaint calls uncommon in the genre (¶¶ 109-135, 183-186). The complaint also concedes differences. In one pair, an accent chord moves from piano to electric guitar (¶ 118). In another, the outputs are “not a direct note-for-note replica” and the tempo differs, about 106.62 BPM against 132.86 BPM (¶¶ 142-143).

A table lists the remaining tracks with the one-line result “Highly similar key musical elements” (¶ 213). It has 32 rows, including the three worked examples, while the complaint elsewhere counts 30 targeted tracks (¶¶ 91, 214). In four rows the output file named does not match the track: “Chill Kingdom” and “Signaling Through The Flames” are paired with a file titled “BFL 4 BC,” “Chillpoint Break” with “BFL Chill Kingdom,” and “Shadows” with “BFL Signaling Through The Flames.” The complaint also treats the output file names, which repeat the song title, as proof of copying (¶¶ 94, 216-217).

Four counts

The statutory citations are reproduced as the complaint gives them. The opening paragraph and ¶ 1 cite the Defend Trade Secrets Act as “18 U.S. Code § 183,” while Count III cites § 1836 under the name “Protect Trade Secret Act.” Count II calls N.Y. CLS Labor Law § 201-e the “Uniform Trade Secret Act.” There is no § 1202 claim for removal of copyright management information, although the complaint says the YouTube uploads carried copyright notices (¶ 228).

The trade-secret theory

The complaint says the band builds each song from many independent layers fitted together “like puzzle pieces,” using methods, software and sound sequences kept on a single hard drive that is not connected to the internet (¶¶ 251-252). It says those methods “cannot be derived simply from listening” to the songs (¶ 238). Its theory is that FLUX is a “reverse-engineering machine” that recovered them from the recordings anyway, and that only a powerful AI system could (¶¶ 49, 243, 255, 305).

To support the theory, the complaint compares the band’s process with the model’s architecture. On information and belief, it describes that architecture two ways: as a multi-stage autoregressive transformer that builds audio token by token (¶¶ 239-240), and as a unified flow-matching diffusion architecture it calls “Self-Flow” (¶¶ 263-264). It calls each “structurally analogous” to the band’s sequential creative process (¶¶ 241, 265). It also says one sound sequence in “Anything You Synthesize” has been used by at least ten other musicians, because the sequence cannot be reverse-engineered and has to be copied directly from the recording (¶ 300).

The complaint says Black Forest Labs, accused in “another matter” of training on unlawfully obtained recordings, called its training data “competitively sensitive” and a trade secret (¶ 246). It does not name that matter.

Damages and remedies

The prayer asks for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed, or actual damages and profits at the plaintiff’s election (Prayer ¶ 2). It does not state a total or say how many works count for damages. The table below is IPLYR’s arithmetic on the two counts the complaint gives, not a figure the plaintiff pleads.

For the DMCA count, the complaint asks for the maximum statutory damages under § 1203(c)(3)(A) or actual damages, but names no amount and no number of violations (¶ 322; Prayer ¶ 8). The trade-secret counts seek actual loss, unjust enrichment or a reasonable royalty, with no figure (Prayer ¶¶ 4-7). The introduction to Count I mentions injunctive relief (¶ 292), but the prayer does not list an injunction.