Music Publishers Sue Anthropic for $3B Over AI Song Piracy
▼ Summary
– A group of music publishers, including Concord and Universal, is suing Anthropic for allegedly illegally downloading over 20,000 copyrighted songs, with potential damages exceeding $3 billion.
– The lawsuit follows a similar case, Bartz v. Anthropic, where a judge ruled training AI on copyrighted content is legal but acquiring it via piracy is not, resulting in a $1.5 billion settlement for Anthropic.
– The publishers discovered the alleged large-scale infringement during the discovery process of the prior authors’ lawsuit, after initially suing over about 500 works.
– The court denied the publishers’ attempt to amend their original lawsuit to include the piracy claims, prompting this new, separate legal action which also names Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder as defendants.
– The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of building its multibillion-dollar business on piracy, despite the company’s public positioning as an AI safety and research firm.
A major legal battle is unfolding in the music industry, with prominent publishers like Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group filing a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic. The publishers allege the firm engaged in the illegal downloading of over 20,000 copyrighted songs, encompassing sheet music, lyrics, and compositions. They estimate potential damages could exceed $3 billion, positioning this case as one of the most significant non-class action copyright disputes in U.S. history.
This new action follows a similar pattern to the earlier Bartz v. Anthropic case, where authors sued the company for using their copyrighted books to train its Claude AI model. In that ruling, the court determined that training AI models on copyrighted content is permissible, but acquiring that content through piracy is not. The authors’ case resulted in a settlement worth approximately $1.5 billion.
The music publishers initially filed a lawsuit concerning roughly 500 works. However, during the discovery phase of the Bartz case, they claim to have uncovered evidence of thousands more unauthorized downloads. After a failed attempt to amend their original complaint to include these piracy allegations, the publishers opted to file this separate, expansive lawsuit. The legal filing names not only Anthropic but also its CEO, Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.
The lawsuit contains strong language, accusing Anthropic of building its “multibillion-dollar business empire” on piracy, despite public positioning as an AI safety and research company. For context, the prior settlement with authors, while substantial, was viewed by some as a manageable cost for a company valued at $183 billion. Anthropic has not provided a public comment on the new allegations from the music publishers.
This case highlights the ongoing and contentious legal frontier surrounding AI development and intellectual property rights. The core dispute centers not on whether AI can be trained using copyrighted material, but on the methods used to obtain that material. The outcome could set a powerful precedent for how creative industries engage with and are compensated by generative AI technologies moving forward.
(Source: TechCrunch)
