Music publisher Reservoir has filed separate lawsuits against Suno and Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the companies infringed its copyrights and violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through their AI training practices.
The complaints, brought by attorney Richard S. Busch, name the companies rather than their executives as defendants. Both actions allege willful direct copyright infringement, circumvention of access controls and removal of copyright management information. The allegations have not been established in court.
In its case against Suno, Reservoir contends that the music-generation company copied protected music for training without securing permission to use its catalog. The publisher points to Suno’s licensing agreements with Warner Music, BMG, Believe and others as evidence that a commercial market exists for licensing music for AI training. Reservoir argues that Suno did not obtain comparable authorization for its works.
The complaint also challenges how Suno handles material supplied by users. Reservoir alleges that users can submit protected music to generate unauthorized derivative works and that Suno’s terms allow the company to use those submissions for further model training despite its safeguards. Those claims extend the dispute beyond the material initially collected to build the service.
Reservoir draws on information surfaced in other litigation against Suno, including cases involving Universal Music, Round Hill Music and Germany’s GEMA. Its complaint also alleges that Suno used an outside entity’s services to obtain training material that included a collection of more than two million music clips scraped from YouTube.
The publisher rejects fair use as a defense for the alleged copying. Fair use permits some unlicensed uses of copyrighted material, but courts assess it through a case-specific analysis that considers the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount used and the effect on the potential market. Reservoir’s emphasis on existing licensing deals puts the market for training permissions at the center of its argument.
Alongside its infringement claims against Suno, Reservoir seeks $2.63 million for alleged circumvention of access controls and another $26.25 million for alleged removal of copyright management information. These are demands for relief, not damages awarded by a court. Copyright management information can include details identifying a work, its author or its rights holder.
The Anthropic complaint concerns 853 works and brings the same categories of claims. Reservoir relies in substantial part on The Atlantic’s AI Watchdog dataset-search tool to support its allegations about training material. The two lawsuits therefore pursue similar legal theories against companies offering different kinds of generative AI services: Suno’s music generator and Anthropic’s Claude assistant.
The Suno action adds to an already extensive set of disputes involving music companies, collecting societies and individual artists. Its licensing partnerships have not resolved claims from other rights holders, including Reservoir, whose complaint seeks to hold the company accountable for the alleged use of its own catalog.
Sources: Digital Music News