Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging a “brazen campaign” of intellectual property theft
techcrunch ·
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges a “brazen campaign” of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works. The publishers accuse Anthropic of using thousands of copyrighted songs and books to train its AI model Claude. Anthropic had not commented at the time of publication. This is not the first such case; earlier lawsuits include one by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group, and the Bartz v. Anthropic case, which resulted in a $1.5 billion judgment against Anthropic. In that prior case, a judge ruled that using copyrighted works was legal but obtaining them through piracy was not. The new lawsuit is described as broader and builds on prior cases, specifically alleging flagrant piracy through illegal torrenting of millions of book copies, including those containing lyrics and sheet music.
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