The publisher of ‘Ring of Fire’ and ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ is suing Suno and Anthropic over AI

The music company that controls Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ and Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ has sued Suno and Anthropic. Reservoir Media filed two federal lawsuits on Wednesday, October 21, one against Suno and one against Anthropic, accusing both of copying its songs to build their AI. It says each has “built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.”

Both cases are in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, brought by Richard Busch, the lawyer who won the ‘Blurred Lines’ case for Marvin Gaye’s family. The Suno suit covers 1,050 songs and the Anthropic suit 853, including Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and ‘Both Sides Now’, Evanescence’s ‘Bring Me to Life’ and Miami Sound Machine’s ‘Conga’. Reservoir asks for up to $150,000 per song wilfully infringed plus damages under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: about $186 million from Suno and $151 million from Anthropic. It also wants every unlicensed copy destroyed, including any kept in “training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure.”

What Reservoir says Suno did

Citing Suno source code leaked earlier this year, the complaint says Suno used proxy services from the data firm Bright Data to scrape “millions of songs and lyrics” from YouTube Music, Deezer and the lyrics site Genius, using “stream ripping” to download songs from YouTube Music. It says Suno then, “without any remuneration to the rights holders”, built a platform where “anyone capable of paying $10 per month can create complete songs based entirely on these illicit copies.”

Suno’s guardrails against copying real artists “are easily circumvented”, it says: the app blocks a prompt naming Reba McEntire but accepts a country song “in the style of Reba McIntyre [sic]”, and asking for a Miles Davis-style blues track with horns and a quartet produced two tracks both called ‘Blue Note Quartet’.

‘Infringe now, make billions’

The sharpest passages go after Suno’s deals with the music business. Warner Music Group settled its case against Suno last year, and BMG and Believe have since signed agreements. Reservoir says that shows Suno “has all but admitted that there is a functioning market for licensing music”, and that it chose not to use it. Busch writes:

Suno’s business model was admittedly and clearly: infringe now, make billions by being the first mover, and try to settle on the cheap later.

Richard Busch, Reservoir’s lawyer, in the Suno complaint

Suno, it adds, “was never meant to be a tool for artists to create music but was instead always meant to replace the artists whose works were being unlawfully copied.”

What it says about Claude

The Anthropic complaint uses the same line with a twist: the company’s plan was to “infringe now, and hope for a two-trillion-dollar IPO later.” It says Anthropic trained Claude on lyrics from web scrapes such as Common Crawl and the ‘YouTube Subtitles’ part of The Pile, and leans heavily on Bartz v. Anthropic, the authors’ case in which a judge found Anthropic had downloaded millions of pirated books from Library Genesis and its mirrors. Reservoir says some of those books contain its lyrics, and that Anthropic picked a text-cleaning tool that stripped out songwriter and publisher credits.

It also quotes Claude against itself. Asked recently to recreate specific songs “for a modern audience”, the complaint says, Claude replied: “These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording.”

The complaint says at least five music cases against Anthropic are already pending in the same court, including two led by Concord, one from BMG and one from Round Hill Music, filed in August. Last week Canada’s biggest newspapers sued Anthropic over 13.5 million articles. Both complaints cite the Third Circuit’s ruling last month that ROSS Intelligence could not claim fair use for training its AI on Thomson Reuters’ legal summaries.

Suno, valued at $5.4 billion in June, is still being sued by Universal Music Group and Sony Music even as it ships features such as AI voices that sing your words. Neither Suno nor Anthropic has commented on the new suits.

Why it matters

Reservoir is the latest independent music company to sue rather than sign, and it turns Suno’s licensing deals against it: if Suno can pay Warner and BMG now, it could have paid everyone from the start. For Anthropic it is another music case built on the piracy findings in Bartz, as it heads towards a public listing.

Sources: Reservoir v. Suno complaint, Reservoir v. Anthropic complaint (N.D. Cal., via CourtListener).