Why Anthropic has been sued by Sony Music, Warner Chappell
What's the story
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishers have sued AI lab Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic has been engaged in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works."
Theft claims
'Blatant theft'
The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of "blatant theft" by using thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model, Claude.
This isn't the first time Anthropic has been hit with an intellectual property lawsuit.
In fact, some lawyers involved in this case also represented Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a similar case filed back in January.
Past lawsuit
Bartz v. Anthropic
A previous case, Bartz v. Anthropic, saw a group of authors accuse the AI lab of using copyrighted works to train products like Claude.
In that landmark case, Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that while it was legal for the AI lab to use copyrighted works, acquiring that content through piracy wasn't lawful.
Expanded allegations
More expansive lawsuit
The latest lawsuit against Anthropic is more expansive than the previous ones.
It accuses the AI lab of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music.
This case builds on earlier arguments and highlights a broader pattern of alleged intellectual property theft by Anthropic in its AI model training practices.
Reproduction claims
Allegations of lyric scraping from authorized repositories
The lawsuit also alleges that Anthropic violated the plaintiffs' copyrights by scraping authorized lyric repositories like MusixMatch and LyricFind.
It claims that lyrics can be extracted from Claude verbatim, citing specific songs such as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger," "Here Comes Santa Claus," and "Paper Rings."