Artificial Intelligence

Impound the Weights

An empty unmarked wooden crate stands open on a bare concrete floor in raking light, loose straw spilled around it, a coil of rope and an open brass padlock beside it.

Three complaints in three days against the same defendant, and the clause worth reading is in none of the coverage.

On 21 October, Reservoir Media Management, its UK arm and Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. Limited brought two actions in the Northern District of California: one against Suno over 1,050 musical compositions, one against Anthropic over the lyrics of 853 of them (Music Business Worldwide, 22 October). The Anthropic docket is 26-cv-12308, before a magistrate judge, jury demanded (Justia). Two days later a subsidiary of Authentic Brands Group, together with other holders of rights in Elvis Presley’s music, sued the same defendant over 274 songs (NME, 25 October). Back in August, Round Hill Music had already brought the same pair of actions against the same two companies, through the counsel who now appears for the Presley plaintiffs (Digital Music News, 17 August). All of it is allegation, none of it proved; the defendant disputes the allegations and says it will defend (Law Commentary, 24 October). I have not read the complaints, so what follows rests on reports that quote them, and I will say which.

Dispose of the money first; it carries the least information. 853 × 150,000 = 127,950,000. 1,050 × 150,000 = 157,500,000. 274 × 150,000 = 41,100,000. The two DMCA heads do the same operation at lower ceilings: 853 × 2,500 and 853 × 25,000. Every figure the week produced, including the nearly $340 million above most of the coverage, is a number of works multiplied by a statutory maximum — which is what a demand for maximum statutory damages is. It is arithmetic performed on a catalogue, and what it describes is the size of the catalogue.

Here is the clause. Alongside an injunction, both Reservoir complaints seek impoundment or destruction of unauthorised copies of the works, “including copies retained in training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure” — MBW’s quotation of the pleadings, not mine of the originals.

Read the list in the order it was written. Training datasets: files on disks, in directories, with sizes. Internal repositories: the same, behind permissions. Server infrastructure: machines, in rooms, with serial numbers. Three plain nouns. A court officer could be sent to any of the three and would know on arrival what to put in the bag.

Then model weights.

The provision underneath the request has a shape. While a case is pending a court may impound the infringing copies and also the plates, molds, masters and like articles by which such copies may be reproduced; at final judgment it may order them destroyed (17 U.S.C. § 503). The shape is a printing shop. The premise is that copying happens somewhere in particular — a plate, a mold, a master tape, a negative — and that if you destroy the place, the copying stops. It is an excellent premise, it held for five centuries, and it is why the remedy exists at all.

A set of weights is a file, so it has a location in the trivial sense. But the file is not what the plaintiffs want destroyed; destroying the file ends the model, and nobody has asked for that. What they want destroyed is whatever within the file is doing the work of their lyrics, and no one in these cases has yet offered to say where that is. The request is for the impoundment of an unspecified fraction of a number.

Which is why the oldest party here is the most instructive. A publisher owns compositions — words and music as written down, never a performance — which is exactly why the two Reservoir actions divide as they do: compositions against the music generator, lyrics against the language model, one catalogue cut twice to match what each machine consumes. Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. was founded in 1900 and calls itself one of Tin Pan Alley’s original publishers (its own page); Reservoir took it on in 2020 with more than sixteen thousand copyrights, “Ring of Fire” and “In the Mood” among them (MusicRow, 18 May 2020). A house built to sell songs as sheets of paper holds the one asset in this dispute that needed no conversion to get inside a language model. Sheet music was always a text file. The industry spent a century treating paper as the poor relation of the master tape, and paper is what walks straight through the door.

The bind is already visible one case over. On 20 October, answering a second suit from Universal and Sony, Suno conceded that it “has not deleted all of the sound recordings it has used to train its AI models,” and said the retention was “consistent with Plaintiffs’ demand in correspondence prior to the Original Action that Suno retain ‘data sets used to train’ Suno’s AI models” (MBW, 22 October, again their quotation of an answer I have not read). In 2024 rightsholders required that the copies be kept, so they could be proved. In 2026 rightsholders are asking that the copies be destroyed. Both demands are procedurally correct and both are addressed to the same hardware.

My expectation is that the money settles — a sum reached by multiplication is built to be divided — and that the destruction request is the first thing traded away. It is the only part of these complaints that would alter what the models are, and the first side to argue it seriously would have to state, in open court, where in a model a song sits. Neither side wants that answer written down anywhere. A remedy nobody can execute is worth precisely what it can be exchanged for, it will be exchanged, and the exchange will be announced as a partnership.

Sources

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