Sony, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging "blatant theft" of intellectual property
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/29/anthropic-sony-warner-music-copyright
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https://www.axios.com/2026/08/29/anthropic-sony-warner-music-copyright
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Fucking finally! Now let them fight.
I refuse to hope for a world where copyright and AI are both destroyed in one lawsuit because it’s too beautiful to ever be real.
I’m concerned how AI often leads to people to defend copyright. I fear it will come out of the fight stronger than ever, while not slowing AI in any meaningful way.
Oh, I’m not defending copyright- I just think that everyone should play by the same rules.
I agree, the big corporations, their CEOs, their shareholders, and their employees should follow in the exact same footsteps as Aaron Swartz. All of them.
For those that don’t know, Aaron was a hero.
The result is going to be some kind of deal where AI use requires to pay a certain percentage or something like $0.01 per token in copyright fees. This will be the end of open weight models you’re allowed to run locally on your PC. It’ll be “piracy”.
It will strengthen the AI corporations by allowing complete monopolization of AI.
Kind of an either/or deal here. If AI loses, copyright wins (and it’s David fucking Ellison, son of Oracle himself). If copyright loses, AI wins.
Yes, we do live in a boring, dumb, and ugly universe.
You and me both Boomer Doomer.
Just latching ointo the top comment: this page compares AI-generated music with the originals it blatantly stole from. It’s against Suno, not Anthropic, but it illustrates the overall issue pretty well.
Obligatory (for Germans): GEMA is not necessarily the good guy here. Neither are Sony and Warner.
Fucking crazy thing is that there have always been big ass people in the same room watching their shit get stolen. Warner, Disney, etc…
I can’t imagine the legal pain if all of the media entities stopped paying ball.
the oligarchs will settle between themselves on a way to fuck us over that’s ok for both of them, as always.
Let’s play the oligarch monopoly illegal antitrust violating merger game… CBS and Paramount is skydance which wants to merge Warner, all run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, which is Oracle, which works with OpenAI, so it totally tracks they would want to sue Anthropic.
This strategy is super familiar. This is almost like how Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, to obtain Java to sue Google over Android… Hmmmmmm
This might be the first time I’m actually rooting for Anthropic. I mean I do use Claude mostly because it’s cheap as hell on a subscription and Kimi has pretty nasty terms of use… But I don’t LIKE the company. But if it’s them vs the Zionellison family, they better win.
I wish them both a very successful lawsuit, that bankrupts their opponent.
And now watch everyone cheer for Sony and Warner to succeed in their lawsuits to extend the grip of copyright. What a timeline.
Wonder if Larry Ellison being a direct line between the US presidency and Israeli intelligence would change anything about people’s opinion on Warner winning… Probably not.
Nah, people are not THAT stupid.
A while back I saw a thread in a piracy community that was cheering some other lawsuit against an AI company for similar reasons, so I wouldn't bet. The anti-AI sentiment is quite strong in these parts.
They’re not going to walk back copyright law so I’ll take these rapacious AI companies being held a little closer to the same standard that we are.
Why not? These laws exist the make the rich more money; if the interests of the rich people trying to make money change it's very possible for the law to change to match that.
Because there’s more money to be made in keeping it than walking it back. I could see them making some kind of shitty carve out for the AI companies that they have to pay into I guess but nothing that would benefit the average person.
We are talking about “Property” - the core foundation of Capitalism. The holy grail of exploitation. Everything in this manufactured belief-system must have an owner and a price, and that price can only be forced upon others with ‘property-rights’ + top-down force (acab’s).
So, just about everything in our sick western fascist/oligarch societies is centered around ‘Property’ and the ideological right and moral duty to maximise profits from that property -> extortion.
The balance might shift slightly/temporarily if a huge cnt are fighting other huge cnt’s, but will NOT go away as long as Capitalism is the sole driver of western societies. Maximum property-rights are the steaming turd every Capitalist cnt are eating/craving.
More infighting is imho better as it slows down this pscho ideology…
You lost all reasonable people at “acab’s”. No one will ever meaningfully rally behind your movement as long as you spread braindead takes like these. It’s poisonous for the left to be affiliated with you.
This isn't a question of "walking it back", though. There was never anything in copyright law that prohibited analyzing a copyrighted work before. This is an attempt to extend it.
Meta literally torrented 82TB of pirated material off anna’s archive and similar sources they’re not just “analyzing” things they paid for. Not to mention the various terms of use stating that content can’t be used to train off of that they violate as they scrape the whole web.
And so, exactly as I predicted, we've got commenters coming out to defend the poor innocent copyright cartels against those awful people pirating their stuff. Violating sacred EULAs, even, what monsters.
If I could get rid of both of them I would but I can’t so I don’t think it’s unreasonable have them go after the companies burning the planet to make the worst slop imaginable instead of people writing switch emulators or whatever. “Violating those sacred EULAs” causes the very site I’m posting this from to fight a constant game of cat and mouse with the bots trying to scrape it.
That’s not how this works though, hoping the law to just punishes people you don’t like without regard for what they are being punished for is madness.
If Anthropic lose this they’ll shrug pay a fee to licence things out of the untold billions they have available to them from credulous investors, and everyone else will have lost the right to do whatever they want with a copyrighted work without the publisher’s permission. That people who consider themselves progressive think that’s a win boggles my mind.
We already don’t have the right to do whatever we want with a copyrighted work without the publishers permission.
Uh AI steals everyone’s work. How it’s legal I’ll never know.
because it was ruled to be a transformative work, like how someone making a video essay on a book/game/movie is (sometimes) not violating copyright.
If AI continues to be treated as transformative work, there should also be a valid case to kill licensing requirements for sampling music. After all, there you’re literally using small clips of someone’s music or similar to make undeniably new art.
To be fair, that should have happened a long time ago. Copyright law hasn’t been fit for purpose for a long time.
I saw this ruling and fully disagree.
So if I modify someone else’s art and call it my own, the courts will respect this precedent and let me go?
if you have enough lawyers and the art ia substantially different (different inteded use) they might
You got downvoted but this is just true lol
(Fuck AI slop though)
Bite each other’s dicks off
I love intellectual property theft.
Mind to explain why? Are you implying everything should be CC0? Are you saying what AI companies are doing is good? Should one license their software as CC0 instead of GPL? (sry, I’m not fully versed in the IP apparatus, so pls ignore my comment if I sound dumb. I will do some more research on it anyway at some point)
I think IP law shouldn't exist, because it assumes that ideas can be owned and leads to predictably absurd results.
can they though? Isn’t the purpose of copyright mainly to manage industries e.g. avoid that one actor passes off their work as someone else’s? And they need to have a expiration date. That’s how I understood it. I can see how it can turn in to a cluster fire easy though, you’re right
Poor baby Sony can’t defend itself
What about Suno and maybe others?
I miss groklaw. We’d all be feasting right about now.
Dunno, it has been fair use all along, why all of a sudden? (sarcasm)