Music Publishers Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Copyright Violations
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, alleging the firm engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale." The suit, filed late Friday in the S. Northern District of California, accuses Anthropic of using thousands of the publishers' protected songs, lyrics, and sheet music to train its AI model without authorization.
Named as defendants are Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann. The complaint, described by the publishers as a "blatant violation of copyright law," claims Anthropic illegally downloaded, scraped, and torrented protected musical works from unauthorized sources, including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror, as well as licensed lyrics platforms such as Musixmatch and LyricFind.
The lawsuit lists well-known songs allegedly reproduced by Claude, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Hallelujah," "Uptown Funk," and Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" and "Paper Rings." The publishers argue that Claude can reproduce protected lyrics in its responses, constituting ongoing infringement.
Legal Claims and Demands
The plaintiffs, which are the publishing arms of Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, are seeking a court order to halt the alleged illegal training and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work wilfully infringed, as well as $25,000 for each instance where copyright-management information was allegedly removed. According to a report by Livemint, the potential damages could reach several billion dollars.
"These acts separately and together inflict immense harm on Music Publishers and the songwriters they proudly represent," the attorneys wrote in the filing. They added that the defendants "can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass infringement is now well-documented."
Anthropic's Response
Anthropic has rejected the allegations, with a spokesperson calling the lawsuit "a recycling of allegations from cases already before the courts." The spokesperson added, "Training generative AI models is a transformative fair use — as the court held in Bartz — and we will defend ourselves robustly."
The reference is to Bartz v. Anthropic, a copyright case brought by authors over pirated books, which Anthropic reportedly settled for $1.5 billion. In that case, a judge ruled that Anthropic could train its models on copyrighted content but could not obtain that content through piracy. The lawyers in the current case also worked on the authors' case, according to Variety.
Sony and Warner argue that the earlier settlement does not protect Anthropic from their claims, as it covered only specific books and past acquisition, not a general license for every copyrighted work, nor the claims of unrelated music publishers. They contend that the payment was merely a business cost that failed to discourage further infringement.