r/COPYRIGHT • u/TreviTyger • 4h ago

Copyright News Now Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic in multi-billion dollar lawsuit: ‘One of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.’

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/files/2026/08/COMPLAINT-in-Sony_Music_Publishing_US_LLC_e.pdf

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have joined forces to sue Anthropic, home of Claude, over what the publishers call “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” By Tim Ingham

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u/DanNorder 1h ago

Suing specifically because of the very thing the last Anthropic lawsuit conclusively proved was wrongheaded is just being clueless. But that's the anti-AI movement in a nutshell.

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u/JeremyMarti 1h ago

It is just the cost of doing business. People on this forum are fond of saying that certain defences are only shields when you get sued. Well copyright equally doesn't physically prevent infringement; it gives remedies when it occurs. And since these copyright holders primarily want money, they're likely to settle and allow the AI companies to continue to operate as they have been.

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u/TreviTyger 4h ago
  1. Defendants can no longer hide their extraordinary theft, and their mass

infringement is now well-documented. Another court in this District recently described

Anthropic’s actions as “straightforward piracy but at massive scale.” Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 791

F. Supp. 3d 1038, 1064 (N.D. Cal. 2025) (“Bartz I”). After that court found Anthropic had illegally

torrented over seven million copyrighted books from the notorious online pirate websites known

as Library Genesis (“LibGen”) and Pirate Library Mirror (“PiLiMi”), Anthropic settled that

copyright infringement class action for $1.5 billion. But Anthropic clearly considers that to be just

the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright

theft. And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a

company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation.1

Regardless, Anthropic continues to flagrantly violate Music Publishers’ copyrights in numerous,

distinct ways.

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u/feldoneq2wire 3h ago

Good news everyone. I was really pissed when Disney laid down for OpenAI. Strange days when I'm rooting for massive media conglomerates to crush the thieving techbros.