Reservoir Fires Off Infringement and DMCA Suits Against Suno and Anthropic, Demanding Nearly $340 Million in Total Damages
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Reservoir Media has sued Suno for copyright infringement and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), seeking nearly $200 million. It has also filed a similar lawsuit against Anthropic.
Reservoir, represented by lawyer Richard S. Busch, filed both lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Suno and Anthropic are named as defendants, but their executives are not.
People who have followed the many copyright lawsuits against major AI companies, especially Suno, which faces several complaints, may recognize these claims.
Reservoir says Suno trained its AI using large amounts of copyrighted music without permission. The company also argues that Suno's licensing deals with Warner Music, BMG, Believe, and others show that there is a real market for licenses allowing music and sound recordings to be used to train AI systems.
"Suno never sought or obtained a license from Reservoir to reproduce, copy, or train on any particular composition or sound recording in Reservoir's catalog, much less for all of its Works. Suno's training-data practices constitute direct copyright infringement on a massive scale," the lawsuit states.
Reservoir says that even though Suno has rules meant to stop users from creating music that sounds too much like real artists, people can reportedly find easy ways around these rules and generate music that resembles artists' work without permission.
Reservoir also says there is "evidence that users can easily create unlicensed derivative works merely by submitting them themselves." According to the company, Suno can then use these user submissions to train its AI models further, even with its protective rules in place.
Reservoir's lawsuit also refers to other cases against Suno, including separate lawsuits brought by Universal Music and Round Hill Music, as well as a case brought by GEMA in Germany.
The lawsuit also discusses Bright Data, a company accused of collecting online information without permission. Round Hill named Bright Data as a defendant in its lawsuit against Suno, and Busch also represents Round Hill. Bright Data is not a defendant in Reservoir's case.
However, Reservoir claims that Suno used services from the Israel-based company to collect files for its AI training data. One file, called 'youtube_music,' reportedly contains more than two million music clips, totaling about 113,879 hours. This is equal to about thirteen years of music files collected from YouTube.
Reservoir also argues that Suno's alleged actions do not count as fair use. The company says that "[b]uilding and maintaining a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material for open-ended future exploitation fails every factor of the fair-use analysis."
Reservoir is asking for the highest amount allowed by law: $150,000 for each of 1,050 works that it says Suno knowingly used in violation of copyright. That would total $157.5 million.
Reservoir is also seeking money for alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This includes $2.63 million for allegedly bypassing access controls and another $26.25 million for allegedly removing copyright management information (CMI), which helps identify and protect copyrighted works.
The lawsuit against Anthropic makes similar claims: that the company knowingly infringed copyrights, bypassed access controls, and removed CMI. It covers 853 works. Like the lawsuit against Suno, it uses the growing amount of publicly available information about AI training. It refers in particular to The Atlantic's AI Watchdog dataset-search tool.
Overall, Reservoir is seeking $127.95 million for Anthropic's alleged copyright infringement, plus another $23.5 million for alleged DMCA violations. Reservoir claims that "Claude has created infringing output for all 853 of the Works, and likely every song in Reservoir's catalog."
A possible legal bill of more than $150 million is a serious matter. But for several reasons, not just the Claude developer's higher company valuation and wider reach, Suno appears to face greater risks.
Although Suno has several major partnerships and has replaced its earlier models with newly trained version 6 models, the AI music generator is facing lawsuits from major record companies other than Warner, Gerencia 360, Round Hill, Denmark's KODA, independent artists including Tony Justice, Canada's SOCAN, David Lowery, and others.