Universal Music Group (UMG), Concord Publishing and ABKCO Music & Records have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, accusing the latter of committing copyright infringement while training its AI chatbot, Claude.
The lawsuit was filed on October 18 and claims that Anthropic “unlawfully” copied and distributed “large amounts of copyrighted works – including the lyrics of myriad musical compositions” that are under the ownership or control of the publishers.
It called Anthropic’s use of the works “widespread and systematic infringement” and said the defendant cannot reproduce, distribute and display copyrighted works to build a business without the proper rights.
“This fundamental rule of copyright law dates all the way from the Statute of Anne in 1710, and it has been applied time and time again to many infringing technological developments in the centuries since. That principle does not disappear simply because a company embellishes its infringement with the words ‘ AI”.
The lawsuit claims that Claude can generate identical or nearly identical copies of songs such as “What a Wonderful World,” “Gimme Shelter,” “American Pie,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Every Breath You Take” and at least 500 others. .
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In this case, the publishers provided examples of Claude being able to deliver an almost word-for-word reproduction of the UMG song “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor.
The plaintiffs asked the court to order the alleged violation to end and to award monetary damages.
The case joins the many coming against major AI developers for copyright infringement.
OpenAI, the developer of AI chat chat ChatGPT, was sued by the Authors Guild on similar grounds. Meta is currently facing a lawsuit from comedian and author Sarah Silverman and others over copyright issues. Google is embroiled in a lawsuit over its data scraping policy for AI training purposes.
Regarding the involvement of the music industry, UMG has been concerned about protecting its catalog and the rights of its artists against AI-related copyright infringements. On October 18, it entered into a strategic partnership with BandLab Technologies focusing on the ethical use of AI to protect artist and songwriter rights.
Over the summer, UMG and Google were said to be in talks to create a tool that would allow the creation of AI tracks legally using the likenesses of artists.
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