Reservoir sues Suno and Anthropic over alleged AI music training

Reservoir Media Management has sued AI companies Suno and Anthropic in federal court, alleging that each used its music catalogue without permission to train systems that can generate songs and lyrics. The lawsuits, filed Oct. 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, target 1,050 compositions in the Suno case and 853 in the Anthropic case. The Suno complaint alleges the company copied Reservoir compositions to train its music-generation models. The Anthropic suit alleges that Claude was trained on lyrics from 853 Reservoir works and can produce copies and derivative works in response to prompts, according to Music Business Worldwide. The songs identified include Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” Reservoir also named works associated with Glenn Miller and Kings of Leon. Reservoir alleged that Suno used proxy services acquired from Bright Data to scrape millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius. Its complaint cites code records showing more than 2 million artist records processed through a YouTube Music workflow and almost 7 million successful song-page processing records through a Genius workflow. The publisher further alleged that Suno trained on cover recordings as well as originals, and that safeguards intended to prevent imitation of existing artists can be bypassed. Suno said the source-code incident primarily concerned outdated code that is no longer used by the company. Reservoir is seeking actual damages and the defendants’ profits, or statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work found to have been wilfully infringed. The Suno action puts statutory damages at $157.5 million and seeks further Digital Millennium Copyright Act damages, for a pleaded total of more than $186 million. The Anthropic case seeks statutory damages of about $128 million plus additional DMCA damages, for a total above $151 million. The complaints also seek injunctions and the impoundment or destruction of unauthorized copies held in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure. Reservoir’s plaintiffs in the Suno case are Reservoir Media Management, Reservoir Media Management (UK) Limited and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Limited. Reservoir contends that Suno created a service through which subscribers paying $10 a month could generate complete songs using allegedly illicit copies. Its complaint says the platform was intended to replace, rather than serve, artists. Reservoir chief executive Golnar Khosrowshahi said AI innovation must not be built by exploiting intellectual property in violation of creators’ rights. Anthropic said it disagreed with the allegations and intended to defend the case vigorously. The new complaint adds to music publishers’ earlier litigation against Claude: Concord, Universal Music Publishing Group and ABKCO filed their first case against Anthropic on Oct. 18, 2023, a docket record shows. Those publishers later brought a January action involving more than 20,000 works, while BMG and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have also sued Anthropic. Suno has separately faced claims from major music companies, Round Hill Music and individual musicians. As reported in August, Round Hill sued both Suno and Anthropic, alleging unlicensed use of hundreds of compositions and saying its cases could eventually encompass 10,000 or more songs. Warner Music Group settled its case against Suno, after which Suno reached similar agreements with BMG and Believe. Universal Music Group and Sony Music have continued their litigation, alleging that Suno’s newer model still infringes copyrights.