Court Considers Consolidating Concord v Anthropic Copyright Suits

The Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco. Photo Credit: Marincyclist

Is it time to consolidate music publishers’ monster copyright lawsuits against Anthropic? Now seeking over $3 billion in damages across two distinct cases, Universal Music and Concord have raised the question in an administrative motion.

We initially covered the first of those cases soon after its October 2023 kickoff. And as many already know, the ongoing complaint accuses the AI giant of infringing on just shy of 500 compositions – including when training its models, in Claude outputs, and more.

More recently, Concord and Universal Music doubled down late last month with a comparatively sweeping action, this time alleging the infringement of approximately 21,000 works.

Though there are a couple key differences between the cases – aside from the number of allegedly infringed compositions, the exact filing parties, and sought damages, that is – it’s worth considering whether they should be combined, per the publisher plaintiffs.

“The two cases will implicate some common legal issues and certain overlapping discovery but will also focus on other distinct legal issues and discovery, including relating to Defendants’ torrenting and the distinct time periods at issue in the cases,” the plaintiffs summed up in their administrative motion.

With that, the mega-case ball is officially in the presiding judge’s court. Closer to the present, the older litigation is still plodding along.

Fact discovery concluded this past November, and the involved parties in mid-January sought assistance in resolving a deposition dispute concerning Anthropic head Dario Amodei (who’s personally a defendant in the new suit but not the 2023 action).

Meanwhile, quite a lot has unfolded since the years-old case’s submission – including a few mixed-bag AI infringement rulings and, more importantly, authors’ $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic settlement.

As we covered, Anthropic actually prevailed on the fair use question in the latter case; among other things, the court found that scanning physical books into a central training database constituted fair use.

Nevertheless, the defendant settled as it stared down a trial for allegedly torrenting a significant number of books for training. Unsurprisingly, then, a piracy claim is front and center in Concord v. Anthropic II (which also focuses on different types of alleged infringement to boot).

That refers to Anthropic’s alleged illegal downloading of “many hundreds of books containing sheet music and song lyrics to musical compositions owned by” the plaintiffs, besides the alleged piracy of books containing “standalone copies of sheet music.”

Additionally, the newer complaint further explores the possibility that a data-crazed Anthropic pirated straight music as well as movies containing protected audio (and, in turn, compositions).