BMG Files Massive Copyright Suit Against Anthropic — 45-Page Complaint Alleges Training Infringement, Piracy, Unlawful Copying, CMI Removals, and More

Music Anthropic is grappling with another massive infringement lawsuit – this time from BMG, which has accused the AI giant of running “roughshod over the rights of countless creatives and rightsholders.”

BMG submitted its nearly 50-page complaint to a California federal court yesterday, about seven weeks after Universal Music and Concord fired off a sweeping suit of their own. The latter dramatically expanded on a prior Anthropic action from the same parties and, in brief, introduced multiple arguments.

And those distinct arguments didn’t come out of left field. Rather, recent years’ AI complaints, levied by music rightsholders, artists, authors, and others, effectively produced something of a guide for spearheading copyright litigation against leading developers.

No longer focused solely on LLMs’ training processes – and less likely to dedicate page after page to verbose descriptions thereof – plaintiffs are now zeroing in on how their protected works were allegedly pirated, copied, modified, incorporated into outputs, and used to generate revenue.

Enter BMG’s monster-complaint, which hits all these bases and more when calling out Anthropic’s alleged “pervasive infringement” and alleged “egregious law-breaking.”

In doing so, the suit doesn’t abandon the unauthorized training allegation; Anthropic is accused of infringing on approximately 500 BMG compositions to train Claude.

“That Claude has been capable of generating and has generated outputs of nearly exact replicas of BMG’s lyrics in response to prompts shows that Anthropic trained Claude on BMG’s copyrighted musical compositions,” the legal text reads.

But the complaint also frames said outputs as evidence of separate infringement – “Claude users have requested the lyrics to and received output from Claude containing all or significant portions of lyrics from BMG owned or controlled musical compositions,” per the document.

Then there’s Anthropic’s alleged copying-related infringement: “Anthropic made and makes additional copies of BMG’s copyrighted lyrics, without permission, when it cleans, processes, trains with, encodes with, and/or finetunes the data input into Claude models, further violating BMG’s copyrights.”

Next, many will recall that authors’ $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement addressed the company’s alleged book piracy – not its aggressive LLM training, which the court found to be fair use.

Directly citing the relevant case, the filing party has accused Anthropic of making “unauthorized copies of BMG’s works via BitTorrent, both by downloading and uploading BMG-owned works.”

“As such, when Anthropic downloaded copies of pirated books and texts, Anthropic simultaneously uploaded to other BitTorrent users numerous additional unauthorized copies of the same books and texts containing BMG’s copyrighted works, thereby making additional copies of BMG’s works and infringing them in multiple ways,” the suit states.

“This, in and of itself, represents a further and separate violation of rights that BMG holds in its copyrighted works, apart from Anthropic using the results of torrenting for training its Claude models and other purposes,” the complaint continues.

Also at issue: alleged infringement in Claude’s outputs, referring not just to the above-described straight copies, but to replies drawing from protected lyrics in one way or another.

Current guardrails, BMG maintains, “do not prevent users from prompting Claude for new songs derived from an existing song, and do not prevent Claude from generating outputs that continue to reproduce and/or prepare derivative works based on copyrighted works.”

Finally, the multifaceted action takes aim at Anthropic’s alleged removal of copyright management information in Claude outputs – the defendant “knowingly and intentionally alters or removes BMG’s CMI without authorization when Claude produces copies of” lyrics.

Meanwhile, in allegedly infringing on BMG IP, Anthropic allegedly dilutes the market for the involved works and deprives the Bertelsmann subsidiary “of the significant license fees to which” it’s allegedly entitled.

DMN reached out to Anthropic for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response. Earlier in March, the company formally moved to stay Concord’s newer suit pending the outcome of the older case.

And BMG, for its part, intends “to designate this action as related to two other actions” – meaning those from Concord and UMG.