Scope of the Allegations
The plaintiffs claim they are victims of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” The compositions cited in the legal action include Mariah Carey’sAll I Want for Christmas is Youthe classicAin’t No Mountain High Enoughand Survivor’sEye of the Tiger. The lawsuit, filed in a California court on August 28, targets Anthropic, its chief executive Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann.
Methodology of the Alleged Infringement
- It claims Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books from pirate websites, which included lyrics and sheet music for songs like Bon Jovi’sLivin’ on a Prayerand Leonard Cohen’sHallelujah.
- The publishers further allege that Anthropic acquired songs by scraping lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, as well as datasets on archive sites such as Common Crawl.
Financial Stakes and Legal Defense
“Defendants specifically elected to harvest unauthorized copies of Music Publishers’ works so that they would not have to pay Music Publishers a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development,” the plaintiffs stated. The publishers are seeking damages that could reach into the billions, based on claims of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each instance of removed or altered identifying data. The suit implies at least 20,000 works are involved in the litigation.
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