Sony Music and Warner filed a lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday, alleging the AI company trained its Claude models on tens of thousands of copyrighted song lyrics and compositions without permission. The publishers are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work plus $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data, potentially totaling billions in damages, and cite songs like 'Livin' on a Prayer' and 'Hallelujah' among the works allegedly used.
futurism.com
· 2026-08-31
Sony Music, Warner Music and other major publishers filed suit against Anthropic, accusing the AI company of illegally torrenting and scraping tens of thousands of copyrighted compositions to train its Claude models. The 48-page complaint claims Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann personally downloaded millions of pirated books via BitTorrent and that the company also lifted lyrics from licensed sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-08-29
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other music publishers have filed suit against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in a California federal court, accusing the AI company of torrenting and scraping copyrighted song lyrics and sheet music to train its Claude models. Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and plans to fight the case in court.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-29
A worker identifying himself as a 'Legacy Media Completion Specialist' describes his job shredding and burning antique books after they've been sliced apart and scanned to train generative AI models. The satirical account follows revelations from a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, in which unsealed court documents showed the company used 'destructive scanning'—cutting spines off physical books to scan them faster, then discarding the remains—and allegedly tried to conceal the practice.
mcsweeneys.net
· 2026-08-29
Canada's requirement that streaming services fund and feature domestic content has drawn attention as a potential irritant in trade negotiations with the United States. US officials and industry groups have pointed to these rules as a barrier that disadvantages American streaming companies operating in Canada.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-08-25
A commentary published on nature.com calls on rights holders and publishers to revise existing copyright licensing agreements specifically to block unauthorized use of creative and scholarly works by AI training systems. The authors argue that current licence terms were not designed with machine-learning ingestion in mind, leaving a gap that companies have exploited to harvest content without consent or compensation.
nature.com
· 2026-08-25
LWN published a tribute marking the passing of Steve French, a longtime contributor to the Linux community. The notice appears as a brief editorial post rather than a detailed report, with copyright information from Eklektix, Inc. accompanying it.
lwn.net
· 2026-08-24
A landmark ruling by Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was lawful under fair use, even though the company was penalized $1.5 billion for obtaining those books through pirated shadow libraries. Attorney Cathy Gellis explains that the judge distinguished between illegally acquiring texts and the act of training an AI on them, comparing the latter to a writer studying literature rather than copying it.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-08-23
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