Round Hill Files $1B Copyright Suits Against Suno, Anthropic

Independent music publisher Round Hill Music has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Anthropic.

The claims:

• The suits allege the defendants used musical works that are owned or managed by Round Hill without authorization, license, or compensation to train their AI models.

• They allege the defendants reproduced Round Hill’s intellectual property on their servers in violation of the Copyright Act, and used data scraping software to bypass security measures and copyright protections in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

• As per The Hollywood Reporter, Round Hill provided a list of 500 songs the defendants had allegedly infringed upon, including “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, written by Jim Steinman, and “I Got You (I Feel Good)” by James Brown.

• In its suits Round Hill says it plans to “amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions,” with damages potentially exceeding $1 billion.

Catalog value:

• Round Hill currently manages over 150 catalogs, including over 200,000 songs performed by artists such as George Harrison, Elvis Presley, Bruno Mars, Chaka Khan, Morgan Wallen, Madonna, Black Sabbath, The Killers, and more.

Other litigation:

• Suno is currently facing a copyright suit from Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group. It settled with Warner Music Group late last year.

• Anthropic faces suits from Universal Music Publishing, Abcko, Concord and BMG over its unauthorized use of song lyrics to train its AI agent, Claude.

What they said:

• Josh Gruss, CEO and Founder of Round Hill Music: “We are not against artificial intelligence. We are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people's creative work and pay the creators nothing. Licensing isn't an obstacle to innovation – it is there to protect the legal owners of the raw material, their property. As an independent music company, we have the freedom and obligation to say that plainly and to act on it. We intend to take these cases to trial and to hold these companies accountable, and we will not accept a resolution that leaves songwriters and artists deprived of their rightful share of compensation.”