Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over copyright

Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages over "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works.

The complaint asks for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance in which identifiable copyright data was stripped. According to The Verge, total damages could reach several billion dollars if the court rules for the plaintiffs and awards the maximum amount.

Founders named as defendants

Beyond the company itself, the complaint names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. It alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The plaintiffs also claim Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which pay to license content from the labels.

The publishers describe the case as targeting "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," alleging that Anthropic and its founders ran a large-scale campaign of illegal torrenting, scraping and downloading to develop and profit from the Claude series of AI models.

Songs named as appearing in Anthropic's training data include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' On a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings."

One of many cases

Anthropic recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 billion. It has also faced lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO, plus separate suits from BMG and Round Hill Music. The Verge reported that Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Details: The Verge