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AI copyright news, graded by source

Court rulings, company filings and allegations in the copyright cases against AI companies and pirate libraries, over books, articles, music, images, video and code. Checked for new filings every three hours; items are posted after review, so some appear later. Get these by e-mail · Court filings, free to read

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AllegationOctober 21, 2026Reservoir Media Management, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC · N.D. Cal., No. 5:26-cv-12308

Independent publisher Reservoir sues Anthropic over lyrics to 853 songs, alleging Claude was trained on them via Common Crawl, Books3 and The Pile and still reproduces them

Reservoir Media and two UK affiliates, including Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., sued Anthropic on Oct. 21, 2026, over 853 musical compositions they say they own or exclusively control, among them songs by Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash and Madonna. The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that the lyrics reached Claude's training data through web crawls such as Common Crawl (scraped from licensed lyrics sites), Books3, The Pile and its YouTube Subtitles subset, and the Internet Archive, and that extraction tools stripped the copyright management information. It also points to Anthropic's book torrenting described in Bartz, and alleges that a recent Claude model still reproduces songs when asked to remake them. It pleads direct infringement, circumvention under DMCA section 1201 and CMI removal under section 1202, and names the Concord and BMG suits as related cases. These are allegations; Anthropic has not yet responded.

Complaint, Dkt. 1 (RECAP) ↗Billboard report ↗

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What the labels mean

Every item says what kind of source it rests on. A court ruling or order is the court's own statement. A company filing is what a defendant says about itself. A government filing is a statement by a government agency that is not a party to the case, such as a statement of interest; it is the government's position, not a ruling. An allegation is what a complaint or motion claims and has not been decided. Reported means press reporting we have not confirmed from the primary document. Summaries are our own; follow the links for the source.

This page is general information, not legal advice. An allegation is not a finding. Whether any of this matters for a particular work or claim is a question for a lawyer.