Anthropic Downloaded Music From Torrent Sites to Train Claude
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic on Friday. They say the company used BitTorrent to take songbooks, then fed them to Claude.
While Anthropic has already admitted torrenting books, it has never conceded that music sat inside those files, hence the copyright case.
Anthropic Music Lawsuit Explained
The complaint names two hauls, both from shadow libraries and containing unlicensed copies of published works.
- Roughly 5 million books came from Library Genesis in June 2021.
- Another 2 million came from Pirate Library Mirror in July 2022.
According to the publishers, sheet music and songbooks sat in those collections. Torrenting is not the only route in the filing.
The publishers also say Anthropic scraped lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind. Both sites pay for the right to display them.
"โฆone of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," the opening line of the complaint reads.
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Why Torrenting Is the Dangerous Part
A judge has already drawn this line once. Buying books and scanning them leaned toward fair use. Taking them from pirate sites did not. The same judge described those downloads bluntly.
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