Sony and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic over music copyright

The music giants Sony and Warner Chappell are suing the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. They claim the AI company committed a blatant copyright violation by taking thousands of songs. The music publishers are calling this lawsuit a massive case of property theft.

This lawsuit matters because artificial intelligence (AI) systems need huge amounts of data to learn how to write text or songs. To get this data, companies like Anthropic often copy files from the internet. Music companies argue that doing this without permission is illegal, and they want the AI company to pay billions of dollars in damages.

What Anthropic is Accused of Doing

The music publishers say Anthropic ran a massive campaign of downloading, scraping, and torrenting copyrighted works. Scraping means using automated software to pull information off websites, while torrenting is a way of downloading files from other users online. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic employees used piracy websites to download over 5 million books. It also claims they scraped lyrics from websites that pay licensing fees to use the songs. Famous songs like "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire and "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen were allegedly copied to train Anthropic's Claude AI assistant.

The Costs and Past Legal Battles

The music companies are asking the court for up to $150,000 for each stolen song. They also want up to $25,000 every time copyright information was stripped from a file. If the music publishers win the maximum amount, the total bill could reach several billion dollars. Anthropic has faced legal trouble over copyright in the past. The company recently settled a different lawsuit with book publishers for $1.5 billion, and other music companies are also taking them to court.

Who Is Being Sued

The lawsuit does not just target the AI company itself. It also names Anthropic's 2 co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, as personal defendants. The legal complaint claims that Mann personally used software to download over 5 million pirated files to build the Claude AI models.

Quick Questions Answered

A: The lawsuit mentions famous songs, including "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire, "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi, and "Paper Rings" by Taylor Swift.

A: They are asking for up to $150,000 for each copyrighted work that was copied, plus up to $25,000 for each instance of removed copyright data.

A: Yes, Anthropic was sued by book authors and ended up settling that case for $1.5 billion, and it faces other active lawsuits from music groups like Universal Music Group.