Sony and Warner sue Anthropic, citing staff chats on piracy

[Leopard96]

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and a long list of other music publishers filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic on August 28th, naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann personally as defendants alongside the company itself. The complaint accuses Anthropic of running what it calls a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works to build and profit from the Claude AI models. The publishers frame the case as one of the largest and most blatant intellectual property thefts in history, seeking damages that could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per infringed work. Anthropic told reporters it disagrees with the claims and intends to defend itself robustly in court

Much of the complaint leans on quotes pulled from an earlier, already settled case brought by book authors, where a court described Anthropic's conduct as straightforward piracy but at massive scale. That earlier case ended with Anthropic agreeing to pay 1.5 billion dollars, the largest copyright recovery on record, after a judge found the company had legally trained on copyrighted books but wrongfully acquired millions of them through pirate sites like LibGen and PiLiMi. Sony and Warner's complaint quotes internal Anthropic Slack messages from that earlier record, including one employee responding to a shared pirate library link with the phrase zlibrary my beloved

The new complaint's actual legal target is music specifically, alleging tens of thousands of song lyrics, compositions and pieces of sheet music ended up in Claude's training data through the same pirated book sources. Music copyright is notoriously tangled since a single song can involve separate rights for the lyrics, the recording and the composition, each potentially held by different companies, which the publishers argue strengthens their case for statutory damages. Worth remembering everything in a complaint is an allegation at this stage rather than a finding of fact by the court

Curious what people think this means for the broader wave of AI copyright litigation given how the earlier book case already set a real financial precedent. Genuinely interested in how differently people are reading the internal chat quotes specifically

"Zlibrary my beloved": Anthropic staff chats extolling piracy cited in Sony suitarstechnica.com

[GateWalker31]

A billion and a half dollar settlement clearly wasn't enough to change the underlying acquisition practices if the allegations in this new complaint are accurate, which is a genuinely striking detail if true. Either the timeline of the alleged conduct predates the settlement entirely or the deterrent effect just didn't work as intended. Worth watching how Anthropic's actual defense addresses that specific timing question

[GlobalBob37]

Training being legal while acquisition was illegal is a distinction that keeps getting lost in casual conversation about these cases, and it matters a lot to how this actually plays out legally. Piracy as the acquisition method is genuinely the weak point across nearly every one of these AI copyright cases right now. Feels like the industry's collective blind spot going forward

[DarkSideRichard47]

Every major AI lab is facing some version of this exact lawsuit at this point, so singling out Anthropic feels a little unfair even though the specific internal quotes here are obviously more colorful than most.

The industry wide pattern matters more than any one company's particularly embarrassing Slack message. Worth keeping that broader context in view

[Rustic Stuart]

Music publishers have historically been genuinely aggressive and effective litigators compared to some other creative industries, so this lawsuit landing after the book authors already won a huge settlement doesn't feel like a coincidence. They're following a proven playbook here. Wouldn't be shocked if this settles for a substantial amount too eventually

[Dylan38]

Worth noting the earlier book case already established that training itself was legal, just the piracy based acquisition method wasn't, which is a meaningfully different finding than people sometimes assume from headlines. That earlier ruling is doing a lot of work in this new complaint specifically. The actual legal question is narrower than the framing suggests

[IronWarden12]

Anthropic's stated intent to defend itself robustly this time, rather than settling quickly the way the book case eventually resolved, is the detail I'm most curious about honestly. Suggests either genuine confidence in a specific legal distinction or a strategic decision to fight rather than set another costly precedent. Worth watching how that actually plays out