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Round Hill Files $1B Copyright Infringement Lawsuits Against Anthropic and Suno

Independent music rights administrator Round Hill Music has filed twin copyright infringement lawsuits against generative AI music platform Suno and frontier foundation model developer Anthropic. The complaints, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, allege that both companies unlawfully scraped, ingested, and reproduced copyrighted musical compositions without licenses, authorization, or compensation to build and train their commercial AI models. Round Hill M

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Round Hill Files $1B Copyright Infringement Lawsuits Against Anthropic and Suno

Independent music rights administrator Round Hill Music has filed twin copyright infringement lawsuits against generative AI music platform Suno and frontier foundation model developer Anthropic. The complaints, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, allege that both companies unlawfully scraped, ingested, and reproduced copyrighted musical compositions without licenses, authorization, or compensation to build and train their commercial AI models.

Round Hill Music, a private equity platform founded in 2010 by chief executive Josh Gruss, manages a music catalog valued at approximately $1.1 billion. The legal actions, led by veteran copyright litigator Richard S. Busch, assert counts of direct copyright infringement under Title 17 of the U.S. Code alongside claims under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for alleged circumvention of technological protection measures.

Technical diagram illustrating audio and text dataset ingestion pipelines, model training weights, and copyright licensing boundaries

Scope of Claims and Statutory Exposure

In its initial filings, Round Hill submitted an exhibit identifying 500 representative musical works allegedly scraped and ingested without authorization. The publisher stated in court filings that it expects to amend the complaints to incorporate potentially 10,000 or more copyrighted compositions as discovery proceeds.

Among the high-profile copyrights cited across the complaints are:

  • "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls
  • "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler (composed by Jim Steinman)
  • "I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown
  • "Lola" by The Kinks
  • "Holy Diver" by Dio

Round Hill is pursuing statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each registered work subjected to willful infringement. Given the potential scale of catalog claims cited in the pleadings, total aggregate damages across both defendants could conceivably exceed $1 billion.

Attack on Fair Use and Circumvention Allegations

The complaints attack the fair use defense frequently cited by AI developers during training corpus assembly. Round Hill argues that ingesting entire musical recordings, compositions, and lyrical arrangements fails all four statutory factors governing fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act:

  1. Purpose and Character: The filings characterize defendant activities as commercial and acquisitive rather than transformative, arguing that retaining complete expressive works to output synthetic media serves commercial substitution.
  2. Nature of Copyrighted Works: The infringed works consist of expressive, highly creative artistic output rather than functional or factual source material.
  3. Substantiality of Taking: Defendants copied and retained complete, unabridged compositions on training servers rather than excerpted snippets.
  4. Market Impact: The resulting models and commercial products operate as market substitutes, undermining the established market for music licensing, mechanical royalties, and public performance rights.

Additionally, the DMCA claims allege that the defendants deployed scraping tools to systematically bypass technological barriers, access controls, and digital rights management protocols designed to prevent unauthorized scraping across web repositories.

The lawsuits mark an escalation in music industry litigation against artificial intelligence developers:

  • Suno: The music generation service already faces ongoing copyright litigation filed jointly by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on behalf of Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music Group. While Warner Music Group reached licensing agreements with selected platforms, independent publishers are now moving aggressively to assert non-label composition rights.
  • Anthropic: The Claude developer is concurrently defending against consolidated copyright litigation brought by Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), Concord Music Group, ABKCO, and BMG Rights Management in federal court over the verbatim output and training ingestion of song lyrics.

Neither Anthropic nor Suno has issued formal court responses to the new complaints. Round Hill chief executive Josh Gruss indicated that the publisher intends to proceed through discovery to trial rather than accept settlements that do not properly license historical catalog ingestion.

Sources

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