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

A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group is suing Anthropic, alleging that the company illegally downloaded more than 20,000 songs, including songs, songs, and songs.

Publishers he said in his voice Wednesday that the damages could top $3 billion, which would be one of the largest antitrust lawsuits filed in U.S. history.

This a case it was issued by the same legal team from Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit, where a group of fictional and disingenuous authors also accuse the AI ​​company of using their legitimate services to train things like Claude.

In the case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to teach copyright holders. However, he also said that it was illegal for Anthropic to access the content through piracy.

Bartz and Anthropic’s lawsuit was a slap in the face of $1.5 billion for Anthropic, with the authors involved receiving about $3,000 per work for about 500,000 copyrighted works. While $1.5 billion seems like a lot of money, it’s not really a return on investment for the company. to be appreciated at $183 billion.

Originally, the music publishers sued Anthropic for using about 500 copyrighted books. But through the discovery process in Bartz’s lawsuit, the publishers say they discovered Anthropic had downloaded thousands more.

The publishers tried to amend their original lawsuit to address the issue of plagiarism, but a court rejected the motion in October, ruling that it failed to investigate the allegations. The move prompted the publisher to instead file a separate lawsuit, which also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

“While Anthropic misrepresents itself as an AI ‘security and research’ company, its history of infringing on copyrighted works clearly shows that its multibillion-dollar business is built on a foundation of lies,” the lawsuit says.

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