Indie publishing company Round Hill Music has filed the latest in a stream of copyright infringement lawsuits seeking damages from AI companies for using owned music as training material. AI firms Suno and Anthropic — two of the largest — are the targets in this case. Round Hill alleges that they scraped and used many thousands of music pieces. In detail, the allegations include building what the plaintiffs call “a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material” on their servers.
Another aspect of the litigation includes the accusation of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
A second company is brought into this: Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks) which specializes in data collection and so-called proxy networks which allow anonymous viewing and crawling the web.
Five hundred songs are listed, including pieces by Goo Goo Dolls, Bonnie Tyler, and James Brown. That’s just the beginning of a promised disclosure of 10,000+ music compositions and recordings that will be part of this case.
The fulcrum of this case, as in other similar ones, is the defensive conception of fair use — a concept that has been part of music infringement arguments for decades, and copyright cases generally.
Anthropic is already mired in lawsuit action from label giants UMG. BMG, and Concord. Suno is presently in court with UMG and Sony Music after settling a global licensing agreement with BMG.