Music Publishers Sue Anthropic for $3 Billion

Music publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music have filed a $3 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against AI company Anthropic.

The details:

• The publishers filed their first suit against Anthropic in 2023, seeking damages of around $75 million for copyright infringement of around 500 works.

• This new, significantly bigger lawsuit follows what the plaintiffs call “persistent and blatant infringement” of their songwriters’ copyrighted compositions.

Allegations:

• As per Music Business Worldwide, the complaint hinges on two key allegations.

• The first is that Anthropic’s founders illegally downloaded millions of pirated books via BitTorrent, including songbooks “containing the publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions.”

• The second is that Anthropic continues to infringe their works by training new Claude AI models without authorization.

• The new lawsuit covers 714 works related to the alleged torrenting, and 20,517 works related to ongoing AI training, as per Music Business Worldwide.

• Songs mentioned in the new suit include “Wild Horses,” “Sweet Caroline,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Eye of the Tiger,” and “Radioactive.”

What they said:

• The plaintiffs, in a statement to Music Business Worldwide: “We have been compelled to file this second lawsuit against Anthropic because of its persistent and brazen infringement of our songwriters’ copyrighted compositions taken from notorious pirate sites. The new case also addresses Anthropic’s ongoing violation of these rights by exploiting lyrics in the training of new AI models without authorization, as well as in the outputs generated. In total, we are suing for infringement of more than 20,000 songs, with potential statutory damages of more than $3 billion. We believe this will be one of the largest (if not the single-largest) non-class action copyright cases filed in the U.S.”