Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic on claims of mass copyright infringement, alleging that the two AI companies scraped hundreds of the publisher’s songs without permission to train their AI models.
Round Hill marks just the latest major lawsuit for both Suno and Anthropic, who’ve both been sued by the major record companies on similar claims. Suno, industry’s biggest AI music generation platform, also faces a suit from Universal Music Group and Sony Music Group (WMG also sued, though the company has since settled) related to its use of copyright to create new AI-generated recordings. Anthropic, meanwhile faces suits from Universal Music Publishing, Abcko, Concord and BMG over the companies’ songs’ lyrics being used to train its AI agent Claude.
Round Hill is a prominent music publisher whose copyrights include the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the Kinks’ “Lola” and Dio’s “Holy Diver.” The company provided a list of 500 songs that the defendants had infringed upon. Round Hill said in the suits that the company plans to “amend to list potentially ten thousand or more of their musical compositions,” with those damages potentially exceeding $1 billion.
“While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI’s value to society, there is simply no reason — other than rote expediency — to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders,” prominent music attorney Richard Busch, representing Round Hill, wrote in the suits.
Round Hill further argued that the latter “‘expediency’ arguments completely falter” when taking into account Suno and Anthropic’s significant cash valuations they’ve earned while “exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works.”
“There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing,” Round Hill said.
Reps for Anthropic and Suno didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
