Anthropic has been drawn into another lawsuit. Music publishers including Universal Music Group filed the suit, arguing that the training of the AI model Claude on song lyrics harms their industry, while Anthropic countered that the practice qualifies as fair use.
At a hearing held on the 21st at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Anthropic said that "the use of millions of song lyrics to train Claude is protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law" and asked the court to dismiss the suit brought by UMG and other music companies, Reuters reported on the 22nd.
Judge Eumi Lee, who is presiding over the case, did not rule at the hearing but questioned both sides closely on the fair use issue, according to Reuters. She pressed the music publishers on whether Claude's ability to generate lyrics threatens their market. Music publishers manage the copyrights to music itself, including the melodies and lyrics created by composers and songwriters.
Sonal Mehta, the attorney representing Anthropic, argued that AI training produces transformative and new content and therefore falls under the fair use doctrine. She also said there is no evidence that large language models such as Claude have reduced demand for lyrics written by humans.
Matt Oppenheim, the attorney for the music publishers, countered that Anthropic is using lyrics improperly to generate competing content and is harming human songwriters. "Claude received about 120,000 requests to produce synthetic lyrics over a six-month period," Oppenheim said, adding that AI-generated content could overwhelm the market very easily.
The case is expected to serve as a turning point in litigation between large language model companies and the creative industries over copyright, following the copyright settlement reached between Anthropic and book publishers in July. William Alsup, a former judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California who retired last year, ruled in a copyright suit brought against Anthropic by three authors including Andrea Bartz that training on books was fair use when the books had been lawfully purchased, because their contents are transformed through the training process.
Around the same time, Judge Vince Chhabria also sided with Meta in a copyright infringement suit against the company, but left room for other outcomes, saying plaintiffs could win in other cases if they more fully demonstrated the harm AI causes to the market for existing works. All of these were lower court rulings and are not binding on other similar cases.
U.S. music publishers UMG, Concord and ABKCO first sued Anthropic for copyright infringement in 2023. They argued that Anthropic infringed copyrights on hundreds of songs by artists including Beyonce, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys in the course of training Claude. Anthropic has maintained that the AI training process helps Claude understand human language and can boost progress and productivity in science, business and education.
Reuters noted that the outcome of the case is expected to become an important precedent for gauging how far copyrighted content can be used to train AI.