Reservoir Media Management, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC

Who is suing

Reservoir Media Management, Inc. is a Delaware corporation based in New York. The other two plaintiffs are English companies it owns, directly or through its UK subsidiary (¶¶ 10-12). The complaint describes Reservoir as an independent music company whose parent, Reservoir Media, Inc., trades on NASDAQ (¶¶ 1, 13). It says Reservoir owns or controls copyrights in tens of thousands of compositions and master recordings (¶ 21).

The suit covers 853 registered compositions listed in Exhibit A, in which Reservoir says it owns 100% of, or exclusively controls, the U.S. copyright (¶¶ 2, 14). The works named in the text include “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides Now,” “Lush Life,” “Ring of Fire,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Conga” and four Evanescence songs (¶ 2). Reservoir licenses lyric display to aggregators such as LyricFind and Musixmatch, on terms that require the song title, songwriters and other identifying information to be shown. The complaint treats that information as the CMI at issue (¶ 26).

Five theories of liability

The evidence the complaint relies on

Most of the factual support comes from other cases and public sources. From Bartz, the complaint cites Anthropic’s admission that at least one released Claude model was trained on data derived from YouTube subtitles in a version of The Pile (¶ 36), and the court’s findings about Library Genesis and PiLiMi (¶¶ 39, 46-47). It cites a Bartz filing for the statement that Anthropic was aware Claude 3 Opus could reconstruct training data, as reported by ETH Zurich researchers (¶ 38). For outputs, it relies on the Concord I record, including the publishers’ expert review of more than 100 Anthropic records (¶ 60); on the BMG complaint (¶ 60); and on example conversations in Anthropic’s public hh-rlhf dataset, including “Let It Go,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Hallelujah” (¶¶ 56-59).

The allegations tied to Reservoir’s own works are narrower. The one specific source allegation is a 2011 Wayback Machine capture of a lyrics page for “Big Yellow Taxi” (¶ 37 and n. 14). Inclusion of each work in Common Crawl, “Book3,” The Pile and YouTube Subtitles is pleaded on information and belief (¶¶ 30-35). The claim that Claude has produced infringing output for all 853 works is also made on information and belief. The complaint says the user logs that would show it are held by Anthropic (¶ 65).

The only post-guardrail output quoted is an exchange in which Sonnet 5, after rewriting songs “for a modern audience,” said its renders kept “landing very close to the originals” (¶¶ 4, 64). The complaint does not name the songs or give a date. The footnote at that point cites outputs described in the Round Hill complaint for “Iris,” “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (¶ 63 n. 24). None of the output examples in the complaint is identified as one of Reservoir’s 853 works.

How the complaint addresses fair use

The complaint argues against fair use before Anthropic has raised it. Its points are that Bartz held indefinite retention in a general-purpose library is not fair use (¶¶ 73, 81); that public-domain material was available for training (¶ 74); that companies and collecting societies already license music for AI training, naming ElevenLabs, Musical AI, Symphonic, Soundverse, GEMA, GCX/Rightsify and Troveo (¶ 75); and that copying by torrent shows a lack of good faith under Harper & Row (¶ 76). It also quotes Anthropic’s Head of Policy calling adversarial distillation of Anthropic’s models “IP theft” (¶ 77).

On timing, the complaint says the scale of the copying came to light only through The Atlantic’s searchable dataset tool (September 2025, extended to music in June 2026) and the filing of Concord II in January 2026 (¶ 68).

Damages math and remedies

Each row total is stated in the complaint (¶¶ 86, 91, 97) and checks: 853 × $150,000 = $127,950,000; 853 × $2,500 = $2,132,500; 853 × $25,000 = $21,325,000. The sum is ours; the complaint does not add the counts together. The DMCA figures assume one violation per work. Statutory damages are pleaded in the alternative to actual damages and profits (¶ 86; Prayer (g)). The prayer also asks for impoundment or destruction under § 503(b) of copies held in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights and server infrastructure, and for an accounting of all training data, scraping and datasets involving the works (Prayer (e)-(f)).

Same counsel, same week: compared with the Elvis complaint

Adams & Reese and Skaggs Faucette filed ABG EPE IP v. Anthropic two days later. Large parts of the two complaints use the same text: the dataset paragraphs, the Newspaper and jusText allegation, the hh-rlhf examples, the unnamed Sonnet 5 exchange, the distillation passage, the five theories and the request to impound model weights. The differences are in the plaintiff-specific facts.

The same plaintiffs also sued Suno, Inc. on 21 October 2026, No. 3:26-cv-12305 (Reservoir v. Suno).

Related matters

The complaint identifies these actions against Anthropic as related and pending in the district (¶ 19):

• Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:24-cv-03811-EKL (“Concord I”)
• Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-00880-EKL (“Concord II”)
• BMG Rights Management (US) LLC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:26-cv-02334

It also cites Round Hill Music LP v. Anthropic PBC (filed 17 August 2026) for its output examples (¶ 63 n. 24).