Music publishers sue Anthropic for $3B over ‘flagrant piracy’ of 20,000 works

A cohort of euphony publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, saying the institution illegally downloaded much than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including expanse music, opus lyrics, and philharmonic compositions.

The publishers said successful a connection on Wednesday that the damages could magnitude to much than $3 billion, which would beryllium 1 of the largest non-class enactment copyright cases filed successful U.S. history.

This lawsuit was filed by the aforesaid ineligible squad from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, successful which a radical of fabrication and nonfiction authors likewise accused the AI institution of utilizing their copyrighted works to bid products similar Claude.

In that case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it is ineligible for Anthropic to bid its models connected copyrighted content. However, helium pointed retired that it was not ineligible for Anthropic to get that contented via piracy.

The Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit became a slap connected the wrist worthy $1.5 cardinal for Anthropic, with impacted writers receiving astir $3,000 per enactment for astir 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 cardinal seems similar a important sum, it’s not precisely back-breaking for a institution valued astatine $183 billion.

Originally, these euphony publishers had filed a suit against Anthropic implicit its usage of astir 500 copyrighted works. But done the find process successful the Bartz case, the publishers accidental they recovered that Anthropic had besides illegally downloaded thousands more.

The publishers tried to amend their archetypal suit to code the piracy issue, but the tribunal denied that question backmost successful October, ruling they’d failed to analyse the piracy claims earlier. That determination prompted the publishers to alternatively record this abstracted lawsuit, which besides names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann arsenic defendants.

“While Anthropic misleadingly claims to beryllium an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its grounds of amerciable torrenting of copyrighted works makes wide that its multibillion-dollar concern empire has successful information been built connected piracy,” the suit says.

Anthropic did not respond to TechCrunch’s petition for comment.