A group of music publishers, including Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the company engaged in the unauthorized downloading of over 20,000 copyrighted songs, sheet music, lyrics, and musical compositions. The damages sought exceed $3 billion, marking one of the largest copyright cases in U.S. history.
The legal action follows a previous case, Bartz v. Anthropic, where authors accused the AI company of using their works without permission. While the court ruled that training AI models on copyrighted content is permissible, acquiring such content through piracy was deemed unlawful.
Initially centered on 500 copyrighted works, the publishers discovered the additional alleged infringements during the Bartz case’s discovery phase. Attempts to amend the original lawsuit were rejected, leading to a separate legal filing against Anthropic, including its CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann.
Source: TechCrunch