The independent music publisher Round Hill Music sued Suno and Anthropic, accusing the two AI companies in a federal court in California of infringing its copyright by illegally scraping hundreds of its songs to train their models without permission.
Round Hill, which owns the rights to songs such as Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart, the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” and more than 10,000 other compositions and recordings, claimed the two companies’ decision to lift the recordings violated the Copyright Act through its scraping. It listed 500 songs it alleged were part of the scraping, though promised that the complaint would be amended to reflect at least 10,000 songs pulled without permission. Such violations, it wrote, would demand damages in the “hundreds of millions of dollars and may ultimately approach or exceed $1 billion.”
“We are not against artificial intelligence,” Round Hill CEO Josh Gruss said in a statement. “We are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people’s creative work and pay the creators nothing. Licensing isn’t an obstacle to innovation – it is there to protect the legal owners of the raw material, their property.”
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Representatives for Suno and Anthropic did not respond to immediate requests for comment.
The lawsuit marks the latest filed against the two companies by a music publisher or label, reflecting the legally murky waters these companies operate in as they train and power their models. Suno has been sued by all three of the major labels – Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music – though it settled with WMG last year. Suno last week struck a licensing agreement with the music company BMG, which itself sued Anthropic earlier this year for allegedly using its recordings to train its models in what it called a scheme of “widespread and systematic infringement.”
Round Hill Music is demanding a jury trial, signaling (at least for now) it has no intention to follow the other music companies in settling or striking a licensing agreement with the AI generators.
“The question in these cases is not complicated,” said Richard S. Busch, the lawyer representing Round Hill Music who previously won the landmark music rights case against Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” on behalf of the Marvin Gaye estate, in a sttaement. Copyrighted works have been used to build multi-billion dollar businesses, and in the case of Anthropic a company now valued at more than a trillion dollars, while the songwriters and publishers who created the foundations of that value have received nothing. There is nothing fair about that use, and we look forward to making our arguments to the Court and in front of a jury.”