Music Publishers Sue AI Company Over ‘Widespread’ Infringement of Copyright

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is once again hitting the headlines but in relation to the music industry as publishers, Universal Music, Concord Publishing and ABKCO are suing Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI company, for copyright infringement in a Tennessee federal court.

About Anthropic

Anthropic calls itself an ‘AI safety and research company.’ It was founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It has become one of the fastest-growing AI companies, with Amazon having taken a minority stake in the business last month.

Amongst Anthropic’s products is Claude - an AI chatbot capable of performing many of the tasks ChatGPT has become known for, such as summarising text, answering questions or generating content from prompts. One of its capabilities, which is now getting Anthropic into trouble, is fetching song lyrics and generating songs from prompts.

What Happened?

Since generative AI has been at our fingertips, many legal issues have been raised surrounding how models are trained and the content they put out. One of these issues relates to copyright law.

Universal Music, Concord Publishing and ABKCO, represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak LLP, are suing Anthropic for misusing an ‘innumerable’ amount of copyrighted song lyrics to train its chatbot Claude. The lawsuit claims that:

‘Despite its purportedly principled approach, Anthropic infringes on copyrights without regard for the law or respect for the creative community whose contributions are the backbone of Anthropic's infringing service.’

One example claims that when prompted to provide the lyrics to the song ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry, the chatbot violates Concorde’s copyright by putting out a nearly identical copy of the lyrics. Furthermore, Anthropic is accused of infringing copyright, even when not specifically asked to do so. For instance, the lawsuit states that the song ‘American Pie’ by Don McLean is used when Claude is prompted to write a song about the death of Buddy Holly.

What Next?

Anthropic is yet to comment on the lawsuit. However, the publishers have asked the court for money damages, and an order to stop the alleged infringement of their copyright.

In relation to the laws of copyright, Oppenheim + Zebrak LLP argues that it is ‘well-established by copyright law that an entity cannot reproduce, distribute, and display someone else’s copyrighted works to build its own business unless it secures permission from rights holders.’

While this lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind regarding AI’s use of song lyrics when being trained and generating content, it is unlikely to be the last. As AI stretches the boundaries of existing laws and raises new legal questions, regulators attempt to catch up with the innovations.

By Scott Hickman