Round Hill's twin suits move the liability from the output to the intake

Fair use is a defense to copying. It is not obviously a defense to getting past a lock, and it has nothing to say about stripping the ownership data out of a file. That is the seam Round Hill is working. Both complaints plead, alongside direct infringement, DMCA circumvention of technical access controls and DMCA removal of copyright management information ^[2], and Round Hill's stated position is that its case does not turn entirely on how the fair use question resolves in the other suits ^[20].

The contrast with the pending Boston litigation is the whole point. There, Suno defends by arguing that training on legitimately acquired recordings is fair use ^[13]. Round Hill's answer is to attack the word "acquired": it alleges the training set was scraped off the open web, YouTube included ^[4], with an Israeli scraping firm, Bright Data, named as a third defendant for allegedly supplying the proxy networks and tools ^[16]. Against Anthropic the scope narrows to lyrics and compositions, since Claude generates text rather than audio, but the access-control theory is the same ^[5].

For anyone embedding either model, that distinction decides where the diligence goes. Round Hill does cite output as evidence, pointing to Claude rewrites that it says kept the structure and melodic hooks of the originals with little changed beyond surface wording ^[1]. But a filter tuned after the fact cannot unscrape a corpus. If the circumvention and CMI counts have legs, the operative facts were fixed at collection time, inside a vendor's pipeline, possibly at a subcontractor the customer has never been told about.

The arithmetic is worth sitting with. Round Hill's plaintiffs control 14,364 compositions and 16,873 recordings ^[7], which is 31,237 works ^[17]. The filings name roughly 500 songs as a bellwether, with a stated plan to reach 10,000 or more compositions ^[8] - so the current sample is about 3.5 percent of the composition catalogue, and the target is about 70 percent of it ^[18]. Each suit separately seeks damages that could exceed a billion dollars ^[6], against a portfolio the company values at $1.1 billion ^[3]; combined, the demand is roughly 1.8 times the asset it is meant to protect ^[19].

The exit that worked before may not be available. Warner settled with Suno in November 2025 and took a licence, and BMG never sued at all, going straight to a licensing alliance ^[14]. Round Hill's CEO Josh Gruss says the company will not settle ^[9], and its counsel, Richard Busch, who won Blurred Lines for the Marvin Gaye estate, has framed it as "there is nothing fair about that use" ^[10]. Suno has also already lost the no-licence-needed argument once, in Munich on 31 July 2026, in a case brought by GEMA, on German and EU law that binds no US court ^[11].