Round Hill Music is the latest music rights business to file copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies in the US, targeting both Suno and Anthropic. The Suno lawsuit also names Israeli company Bright Data as a defendant, on the basis Suno allegedly used Bright Data’s tools to illegally scrape millions of tracks off digital platforms like YouTube in order to build its training dataset.
Commenting on the legal action, Round Hill boss Josh Gruss insists “we are not against artificial intelligence”, but “we are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people’s creative work and pay the creators nothing”.
The obligation on AI and any other tech companies to secure licences to make use of existing music “isn't an obstacle to innovation”, Gruss argues, that obligation is simply there “to protect the legal owners of the raw material”. And, he adds, “as an independent music company, we have the freedom and obligation to say that plainly and to act on it”.
Round Hill describes itself as a “pioneering private equity platform that manages a $1.1billion portfolio of music rights”. As well as managing the investment funds that own those rights, it also operates as a label and publisher to manage and monetise all that music.
The legal arguments against both AI companies are pretty familiar, as both have already been sued by other individuals and companies within the music industry. Although Suno has agreed some licensing deals - for example with Warner Music and BMG - it is still fighting litigation filed by Universal Music and Sony Music, and other lawsuits filed by independent musicians.
The most prominent copyright lawsuit involving Anthropic was filed by a group of book authors which resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement. However a group of music publishers have also sued Anthropic, claiming - like Round Hill - that the AI company illegally copied large quantities of lyrics when curating a dataset to train its Claude AI.
Round Hill’s two lawsuits make various legal arguments against Suno and Anthropic, though the core complaint is that both AI companies made unlicensed copies of recordings and songs owned and controlled by Round Hill in order to train their respective models.
Like most AI businesses, Suno and Anthropic both insist that AI training is ‘fair use’ under US copyright law, meaning they didn’t need to get permission or secure licences from creators and rightsholders in order to copy existing works to train their models.
Although some early judgements in other AI copyrights cases, including the one between the authors and Anthropic, concluded that AI training can be fair use, Round Hill is adamant the fair use defence does not apply with Suno or Anthropic’s use of its songs and recordings.
In part, it argues, that is because of the “indefinite retention of unlicensed copies of copyrighted works” by both AI companies. “Building and maintaining a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material for open-ended future exploitation fails every factor of the fair-use analysis”, it insists, because “the purpose is acquisitive rather than transformative”.
Round Hill is working with prominent music industry lawyer Richard Busch on these legal battles, and he stresses his confidence that the fair use defence can be defeated in a statement on the new lawsuits.
“The question in these cases is not complicated”, he says, adding “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”.
“There is nothing fair about that use”, he insists, before concluding, “we look forward to making our arguments to the court and in front of a jury”.