Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic, accusing the company of using BitTorrent to steal songbooks and feed them to its AI model Claude. The publishers identified two data hauls downloaded from pirate libraries: approximately 5 million works in June 2021 and an additional 2 million in July 2022, containing sheet music and song lyrics. The lawsuit seeks up to $150,000 per infringed song, with hundreds of songs potentially at issue. A judge has already established that downloading from pirate sites does not fall under fair use, a precedent the publishers intend to leverage. The legal battle now hinges on determining whether the songs were acquired through legitimate purchase or downloaded via BitTorrent swarm.
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