Round Hill Music sues Suno and Anthropic for up to $1 billion apiece

Music publisher Round Hill Music has filed separate copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno and Anthropic, alleging both companies used its catalog to train their AI systems without permission or payment.

The complaints, filed Monday, August 17, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, each seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed. Round Hill says the total in each case could run into "hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially approach or conceivably exceed $1 billion."

Round Hill and five affiliated funds control more than 14,000 compositions and nearly 17,000 recordings. Each suit attaches an exhibit of 500 songs as a "prioritized representative bellwether," with Round Hill saying it may later expand the claims to cover 10,000 or more works, including the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)."

The Suno complaint also names data-scraping firm Bright Data as a defendant, accusing it of supplying the proxy networks that let Suno pull music and lyrics from licensed platforms. On that claim alone, Round Hill puts the potential damages at $75 million. A Bright Data spokesperson said the company "provides access to publicly available information on the open internet" and is "committed to enabling that access responsibly and transparently."

"We are not against artificial intelligence," Round Hill founder and CEO Josh Gruss said. "We are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions from other people's creative work and pay the creators nothing." Gruss said the company intends "to take these cases to trial" rather than negotiate a settlement.

Round Hill's attorney, Richard Busch, who previously won the "Blurred Lines" case for Marvin Gaye's family, argued the companies built enormous value on uncompensated work. "Copyrighted works have been used to build multi-billion dollar businesses," he said, "while the songwriters and publishers who created the foundations of that value have received nothing."

Anthropic is already defending three other music copyright cases in the same district, brought by Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group, ABKCO and BMG Rights Management. Suno, meanwhile, is fighting a separate suit from the major labels in Boston and lost an initial ruling in a German case brought by the collecting society GEMA in July.