Round Hill Music has filed copyright infringement lawsuits in the United States against Suno and Anthropic, alleging both artificial intelligence companies used its recordings and songs without licences to train generative models.
The Suno action also names Bright Data, an Israeli company, as a defendant. Round Hill claims Suno used Bright Data’s tools to scrape millions of tracks from digital platforms such as YouTube to build its training dataset.
Round Hill’s Josh Gruss said the company is “not against artificial intelligence”, but is “against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people’s creative work and pay the creators nothing”.
Gruss added that the requirement for AI and other technology companies to secure licences for existing music “isn’t an obstacle to innovation”, but exists “to protect the legal owners of the raw material”. He said that “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 $1.1 billion portfolio of music rights”. The company also operates as a label and publisher to manage and monetise that catalogue.
Fair use defence and prior litigation
Both AI companies argue that training on copyrighted material is fair use under US copyright law, meaning no permission or licences were required. Round Hill rejects that defence in both cases.
Suno has agreed some licensing deals, including with Warner Music and BMG, but it is still fighting litigation filed by Universal Music and Sony Music, as well as lawsuits from independent musicians.
The most prominent copyright case involving Anthropic was brought by a group of book authors and resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement. A group of music publishers has 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 core claims
Round Hill’s two lawsuits make various legal arguments, but the central complaint is that Suno and Anthropic made unlicensed copies of recordings and songs owned or controlled by Round Hill to train their respective models.
Although some early judgments in other AI copyright cases, including the authors’ case against Anthropic, concluded that AI training can be fair use, Round Hill argues the defence does not apply to Suno’s or Anthropic’s use of its songs and recordings.
In part, Round Hill points to the “indefinite retention of unlicensed copies of copyrighted works” by both companies. It states: “Building and maintaining a permanent stockpile of copyrighted material for open-ended future exploitation fails every factor of the fair-use analysis”, because “the purpose is acquisitive rather than transformative”.
Legal team statement
Round Hill is working with prominent music industry lawyer Richard Busch on the cases. Busch said he is confident the fair use defence can be defeated.
“The question in these cases is not complicated,” he said. “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 said. “We look forward to making our arguments to the court and in front of a jury.”
