Photo Credit: Zach M
Intense AI courtroom battles continue to roil the music industry, with multiple high-stakes skirmishes showing few signs of calming down. For starters, Anthropic and Suno are now aggressively pushing back against Round Hill’s bullish attempt to ‘relate’ their cases – even as the Claude developer seeks to add the former suit to a pile of its own industry litigation. Separately, major labels Sony, UMG, and an unlikely indie music hero just scored some zingers against Suno.
The raging legal volleys are all great news for the battling barristers and firms, with only AI capable of tracking the billable hours at this point. Indeed, brand-name law firms can easily spike bills with $2,000+ hourly rates, with AI now funding expensive college tuitions, second vacation homes, and other lavish perks for well-positioned legal eagles.
So what battles are being fought this week?
Starting with Round Hill, the mega-pub is now launching a follow-up offensive against Suno and Anthropic by seeking to ‘relate’ the two cases. The maneuver would essentially tie the two matters and allow the proverbial killing of two AI birds with one litigatory stone.
The copyright confrontations’ sub-dispute surfaced in separate filings from Anthropic and Suno. As we broke down closer to August’s start, each company is facing an infringement action from Round Hill, which claims that the defendants trained their models on protected works sans authorization and proceeded to generate infringing outputs.
Maintaining its offensive, Round Hill promptly moved to relate (not consolidate) the cases.
For those favoring judicial economy, some of these moves make sense. At present, major music publishers’ first and second suits against Anthropic are related alongside BMG’s distinct-but-similar Anthropic complaint. Back in April, the judge presiding over all three cases entered a 90-day stay “to promote judicial economy, conserve party resources, and facilitate coordination between the related actions,” the oldest of which has been unfolding since 2023.
And more recently, Anthropic on Tuesday formally filed to add Round Hill’s complaint to a growing collection of related litigation.
“Like the Concord/BMG Actions, the Round Hill Action is a copyright case alleging that Anthropic’s Claude AI models allegedly use the text of a music publisher’s song lyrics in training data and purportedly reproduce lyrics in outputs,” the AI giant wrote in support of its argument. “The claims in the Round Hill Action are virtually identical to those in the Concord/BMG Actions.”
Apparently, though, this argument doesn’t extend to the possibility of relating Round Hill’s Suno and Anthropic suits, between which the latter defendant believes there are key differences.
“The two cases involve different defendants, different AI technologies, different alleged infringing conduct, different property, and different types of copyrights,” Anthropic indicated.
“The only common ground between these cases is that the same music company plaintiffs filed both suits on the same day. But that is not enough. The two suits involve alleged infringement of different copyrights (sound recordings versus only musical compositions), by different defendants, and by wholly different means,” the IPO-minded company continued.
Meanwhile, Suno echoed the points: “The only meaningful similarity between Anthropic and Suno is that they are both copyright infringement cases brought by the same Plaintiffs against generative AI companies who allegedly used some of the same songs as ‘training data.’
“That is insufficient to satisfy the standard for relation,” the BMG-partnered platform claimed in a filing of its own.
“The defendants across the two cases are completely different companies,” Suno continued, proceeding to emphasize that “the AI services they offer are distinct” while also stressing the existence of a contributory claim against Bright Data in the Suno case but not the Anthropic action.
“Suno also includes a cause of action not asserted in Anthropic, for contributory copyright infringement against Bright Data. This cause of action will involve separate legal and factual issues not present in Anthropic.”
In other battlefields, majors Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have now amended their copyright suit against Suno in Massachusetts federal court, alleging that the music AI giant violated the law by stream-ripping YouTube with tools like YT-DLP.
That introduces the big ‘no-no’ of circumventing YouTube’s ‘rolling cipher’ encryption and ‘scrape-training’ data with copyrighted works. Suddenly, the labels have a legal workaround to Suno’s plan to win on fair use arguments by introducing direct copyright infringement, and Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV authorized the amended complaint.
But Saylor also rejected the labels’ attempt to add a whopping 61,026 new recordings (to the tune of $9 billion in potential statutory damages) to the existing list of 560 works, ruling that the dramatically expanded list would complicate and delay a decision on Suno’s fair use arguments.
On that note, the case against Suno is now hurtling toward a decision on the all-important fair use aspect, which could set a critical precedent in these AI-focused copyright battles.
Incidentally, Saylor permitted a similar stream-ripping claim to proceed in a separate class action filed by indie artist Tony Justice. That ‘David vs. Goliath’ case is now moving ahead, as first reported by Digital Music News, despite Suno’s best efforts to squash it.
Time will tell which arguments prevail and, of course, which parties emerge victorious in the showdowns themselves. Even at this relatively early stage, however, it seems safe to declare the litigants’ attorneys winners.
That the billable hours are already flying hasn’t been lost on Suno. With a goal of developing “the AI tools that will define how legal teams operate in the next decade,” the startup recently hired a former TikTok higher-up as its legal operations lead.
Additionally, the company last week quietly welcomed an ex-LegalZoom head of talent acquisition in the identical role.
