THE IP BRIEFINGNEW YORK

Issue No. 068 · Story 03 · October 24, 2026

Reservoir Sues Anthropic Over Song Lyrics

Reservoir Media Management and two other music publishers sued Anthropic on October 21 in federal court in the Northern District of California. They allege Anthropic copied the lyrics of 853 compositions to train its AI model without a license or payment. Anthropic has not responded in court, and no court has decided the claims.

§The publishers allege Anthropic obtained lyrics by scraping and torrenting pirated sources.
§The complaint claims infringement, circumvention of copyright protection measures and removal of copyright management information.
§They seek $127.95 million in statutory damages for infringement, more than $23 million for other claims, a permanent injunction and destruction of infringing copies, including training datasets and model weights.

THE TAKEAWAY

The protection measure and copyright information claims ask how Anthropic allegedly obtained and handled the lyrics, separate from whether copying them for training infringed copyright.

Filing: ESCA Filings

Same issue

01

Eminem's Former Employee Strange Pleads Guilty to Copyright Charge

Eminem's former employee Joseph Strange pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement on October 22 in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan. The Justice Department says he copied and sold unreleased music for about $50,000 without authorization. The court has not decided whether to accept the plea agreement, and no sentence has been imposed.

02

Apple Keeps Servant Jury Verdict

Apple and the other defendants prevailed on October 22 at the Ninth Circuit in Francesca Gregorini's copyright appeal over Servant. Gregorini alleged the show's first three episodes were substantially similar to her film The Truth About Emanuel. The panel affirmed the jury's verdict for the defendants.

04

USPTO Refuses Anthropic's CLAUDE MYTHOS Registration for Now

The USPTO issued a nonfinal refusal of Anthropic's application to register CLAUDE MYTHOS for AI software services on October 20. The examiner found a likelihood of confusion with a MYTHOS registration for software services involving searchable databases and customizable surveys. Anthropic has three months to respond.