Abstract:
Sony Music and Warner Music Publishing have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing artificial intelligence company Anthropic of using tens of thousands of copyrighted works without authorization to develop and operate its Claude series of artificial intelligence models.
The two companies are seeking damages of up to US$150,000 per work from Anthropic, and an additional compensation of up to US$25,000 for each identifiable deletion of copyright information. If the court ultimately supports the plaintiffs' claims and awards maximum damages, the total amount involved in the case could reach billions of dollars.
In the complaint, the plaintiffs called the relevant actions "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing intellectual property thefts in history," accusing Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann of launching a large-scale illegal download, crawling and dissemination of copyrighted works in order to train artificial intelligence models and obtain huge profits from them.
The lawsuit names not only Anthropic as a defendant, but also Amodei and Mann as individual defendants. The complaint alleges that Mann downloaded more than 5 million pirated books through BitTorrent, and that Anthropic employees downloaded at least another 2 million works from the Pirate Library Mirror. The plaintiff also accused Anthropic of scraping lyrics from websites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, which have paid music companies to license relevant content.
The complaint alleges that several well-known songs appeared in Anthropic’s training data, including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell, “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi, “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire, “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, and “Paper Rings” by Taylor Swift.
This lawsuit is the latest in a series of copyright disputes Anthropic has faced recently. The company had just reached a settlement with the publishing industry over copyright litigation, paying $1.5 billion. In addition, Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO have also filed lawsuits against Anthropic respectively, while BMG and Round Hill Music have launched separate legal actions.
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