A group of music publishers led by Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group are suing Anthropic, according to a report by Reuters. The suit accuses the AI company of illegally downloading more than 20,000 copyrighted songs, including sheet music, lyrics and compositions.

These songs were then allegedly fed into the chatbot Claude for training purposes. There are some iconic tunes named by Universal in the suit, including tracks by The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Elton John, among many others. Concord is an independent publisher that handles artists like Common, Killer Mike and Korn.

The publishers issued a statement saying that the damages could amount to more than $3 billion. This would make it one of the largest non-class action copyright cases in US history.

"While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI 'safety and research' company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy," the lawsuit says.

The suit was filed by the same legal team as last year's Bartz v. Anthropic case. The music publishers say they found that Anthropic had been illegally downloading thousands of songs during the discovery process of that suit.

For the unfamiliar, the Bartz v. Anthropic case ended with an award of $1.5 billion to impacted writers after it was found that the company had illegally downloaded their published works for similar training purposes. The terms of that agreement dictated that the 500,000 authors involved in the case would get $3,000 per work. The $1.5 billion looks like a big number, but not so much when broken down like that. Also, Anthropic is worth around $350 billion.

In the Bartz case, Judge William Alsup ruled that it was legal for Anthropic to train its models on copyrighted content but not legal to acquire that content via piracy. We'll have to wait and see how this new suit shakes out. The legal precedent here seems to suggest that if Anthropic would have just spent a buck on each copyrighted song, then they'd be in the clear. That's an odd distinction when it comes to building an entire company around snatching up copyrighted content, but whatever.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/music-publishers-sue-anthropic-for-3-billion-over-flagrant-piracy-185459358.html?src=rss

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Google has agreed to a preliminary $135 million settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by Android users who accused it of harvesting their data without consent. The suit alleged that since November 12, 2017, Google has been illegally collecting cellular data from phones purchased through carriers, even when apps were closed or location features were disabled.

As reported by Reuters, the affected users believed Google using their data for marketing and product development meant it was guilty of "conversion." In US law, conversion occurs when one party takes the property of another with "the intent to deprive them of it" or "exert property rights over it."

Subject to approval from a judge, a settlement of $135 million was filed in a San Jose federal court earlier this week. The payout would be one of, if not the largest ever in a case of this nature, according to Glen Summers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

Each user involved in the lawsuit would be entitled to up to $100 from Google, which denies any wrongdoing and has agreed to seek consent during the setup process of a new phone from now on. A toggle will be added to enable users to easily disable data transfer, while the Alphabet-owned company will also adjust its terms of service accordingly. A trial is scheduled for August 5.

This is the second settlement this week for Google. On January 26, the company also agreed to a $68 million settlement regarding claims that Google Assistant had been spying on users after being triggered by what it had misheard as wake words. Again, Google denied any wrongdoing in the class action suit.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-will-pay-135-million-to-settle-illegal-data-collection-lawsuit-133012112.html?src=rss

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