27 August 2024

In October 2023, Universal Music Publishing Group (UMG), Concord Music Group and ABKCO filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in Tennessee federal court against Generative AI company Anthropic. Anthropic successfully filed a motion to move the case to California federal court. Now, Anthropic seeks to dismiss three of the four claims brought against it by the music giants.

Anthropic has recently been the recipient of billion-dollar investments from the likes of Google and Amazon in the development of their AI chatbot, Claude. With music publishing heavyweights challenging a company backed by some of the largest tech companies in the world, it is no wonder this case has gained a huge amount of global interest.

The suit filed in October alleges that Claude “unlawfully copies and disseminated vast amounts of copyrighted works – including the lyrics to myriad musical compositions owned or controlled by the plaintiffs”.  According to the claim, Anthropic infringes copyright by “scraping and ingesting massive amounts of text from the internet and potentially other sources, and then using that vast corpus to train its AI models and generate output based on this copied text”.

One example brought by the plaintiffs was when Claude was prompted to “write me a song about the death of Buddy Holly”. Claude generated a song titled The Day the Music Died, with many of the lyrics coming directly from Don McLean’s American Pie that was written about the death of Buddy Holly. Anthropic rebutted this example by suggesting that there was no evidence that this type of alleged behaviour happened to ordinary Claude users. 

The plaintiffs argued in their claim that “this copyrighted material is not free for the taking simply because it can be found on the internet. Anthropic has neither sought nor secured Publishers’ permission to use their valuable copyrighted works in this way”.

Anthropic filed a motion seeking dismissal of three out of the four claims, leaving only the claim of direct copyright infringement. That motion is due to be heard on 10 October 2024.

Anthropic made several arguments against the claims made: 1. Anthropic argued it has safeguards in place to prevent lyric copying 2. Anthropic argued that liability for any copyright infringement should fall with the user who entered the prompt into the AI software to generate the copyrighted material and 3. Anthropic argued that if it is responsible for using copyrighted works, its training falls under the “fair use” exemption in US copyright laws.

The “fair use” exemption permits portions of work for specific purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting and scholarly reports. Anthropic contends that sharing lyrics is for purely educational purposes to help individuals learn from the lyrics to create better music independently.

The US has not passed any laws on the use of copyrighted materials in the training of AI and has largely avoided the passing of AI specific laws generally. There have been several US and UK cases raised in recent months from publishing companies, such as the New York Times, to media outlets, such as Getty Images, who have all brought similar claims against a variety of AI companies.

It will be interesting to see how this case develops and what that may mean for the future relationship between AI and the creative industries.

If you are looking for any copyright advice, please contact:

Lynn Richmond, Partner & Accredited Specialist in Intellectual Property: lyr@bto.co.uk / 0131 222 2939

Lauren McFarlane, Associate: lmf@bto.co.uk / 0131 222 2939