Wednesday, August 19, 2026
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Complaint Alleges AI Transformations Are Infringements
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Round Hill, an independent music publishing company that holds the rights to a huge trove of musical compositions and recordings, has brought two lawsuits against companies that, it says, take copyrighted works and uses artificial intelligence to transform them into new songs, asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to halt the activity and order recompense for past infringements.
Whether taking such works and churning them into similar ones is “fair use” or foul play is a question that has arisen in other litigation and in a continuing debate within the entertainment industry.
In its actions filed Monday, Round Hill is identified as “a leading independent music company that, through its affiliated catalog entities, owns or exclusively controls copyrights in tens of thousands of musical compositions and master recordings spanning virtually every genre and era of popular music.” Its catalogs, the pleading says, “include works by some of the most celebrated songwriters and recording artists in history, from classic rock and pop to country, R&B, and alternative.”
Each action seeks disgorgement of the defendants’ profits from the use of artificial intelligence—or “AI”—to revamp songs “or, in the alternative, an award of statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed…which Round Hill believes will cumulatively be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and may ultimately approach or exceed $1 billion.”
Suit Against Anthropic
One of the suits is against Anthropic PBC, headquartered in San Francisco. The complaint alleges that Anthropic “develops, operates, sells, and licenses AI programs, including the Claude family of large language models,” specifying:
“Anthropic has monetized its Claude models to both individual end users and corporate customers, charging subscription fees ranging from $20 to $200 or more per month, plus usage-based API fees. Anthropic has built that success on the unauthorized use of numerous copyrighted works, including those of Round Hill.“
The pleading sets forth:
“…Defendant Anthropic has essentially put to test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet. However, rather than wait out the ‘infinite’ amount of time that theorem posits is necessary for said monkeys with typewriters to randomly, one letter at a time, string together that famous question of ‘To be or not to be?’, Anthropic found a work around. Rather than training its monkeys (the Al Models) from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit.”
Action Against Suno
Also sued, in a separate action, are Suno and Bright Data. The complaint says the plaintiff “brings this action to enforce these exclusive rights against Defendant Suno, who has built its entire business model on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before, and Defendant Bright Data, who has knowingly and intentionally facilitated Suno’s widespread illegal activities.”
Suno, the pleading explains, “develops, operates, and sells a generative AI music service that creates digital music based on user prompts,” charging users “monthly subscription fees to use its platform, which produces AI-generated music files designed to mimic human-made songs.” Bright Data provides web-scraping tools.
The complaint against those defendants provides as an example of the AI transformation the original words, sung by a chorus, in James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and those conjured up. The original lyrics are:
“Wo! I feel good, I knew that I would now
“I feel good, I knew that I would now
“So good, so good, I got you
“Wo! I feel nice, like sugar and spice
“I feel nice, like sugar and spice
“So nice, so nice, I got you.”
As revamped through AI, the lyrics are:
“I feel good
“Because I’ve got you
“I knew it would
“I knew it would
“I feel good
“When you pull me through
“I knew it would
“I knew it would
“(With you).”
Not ‘Fair Use’
Each pleading seeks to counter the anticipated fair-use defense. The complaint against Anthropic says:
“Building and maintaining a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material for open-ended future exploitation fails every factor of the fair-use analysis: the purpose is acquisitive rather than transformative; entire works are retained without limitation; and the unauthorized copies function as market substitutes, displacing sales and licenses on a one- to-one basis.”
It adds:
“While in other cases for copyright infringement, Defendant has waxed poetic about the necessity of progress and AI’s value to society, there is simply no reason—other than rote expediency—to have that progress come at the cost of copyrights holders.”
The pleading notes “even if, accepting arguendo, the procedural hurdles for ensuring proper licensing for the size of data needed” for the sort of project that’s involved, “there exists an entire universe of public domain and non-copyrighted materials” that are available including “literally every (formerly) copyrighted work under U.S. Copyright law written before 1931 (1926 for sound recordings)” which “has now entered the public domain.”
$1.2 Trillion Value
The complaint comments:
“[T]hese ‘expediency’ arguments completely falter when compared to the massive valuation—$1.2 trillion—that Anthropic has garnered exploiting illicit copies of copyrighted works, including the Round Hill Works. The Works were created over periods of dozens of years, and Anthropic, by its infringing conduct, is destroying the value of these works in a matter of a few years with only profit as its motive. And there are AI companies and collective rights organizations who actually seek permission and pay rights holders to create data sets for AI training….Not only does this further undercut any ‘expediency’ arguments, but it also directly demonstrates the harm Round Hill faces to license with these forthright entities that license and pay for use of copyrighted music.”
The complaint against Suno and Bright Data includes much of the same language. It remarks:
“There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing.”
Lawyer Comments
The complaint is signed by Richard S. Busch, a member of the State Bar of California practicing with the Nashville firm of Adams & Reese, LLP. Busch said in a press release:
“The question in these cases is not complicated. Copyrighted works have been used to build multi-billion dollar businesses, and in the case of Anthropic a company now valued at more than a trillion dollars, while the songwriters and publishers who created the foundations of that value have received nothing.”
The suits come in Round Hill Music LP v. Suno, Inc., 5:26cv8507 and Round Hill Music LP v. Anthropic PBC, 5:26cv8505.
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