- Universal Music Group and other music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic.
- The filing claims Anthropic distributes copyrighted music lyrics through its AI model.
- Other notable AI platforms like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have faced similar issues.
Dutch-American multinational record label Universal Music Group and other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic – an artificial intelligence startup – for using its AI model Claude 2 to distribute lyrics that are protected by copyright. UMG is seeking $75 million in damages.
Universal Music Group claims users can prompt Claude 2 to generate lyrics that are nearly exact replicas of other songs. The lawsuit filed in Tennessee mentioned examples such as the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
Furthermore, the group of publishers also allege that the generative AI model uses phrases similar to existing songs even when not asked to recreate songs. They cited examples of prompts that led to Claude 2 generating exact lyrics of notable songs.
Following the rise of artificial intelligence, there has been a soar of copyright allegations against AI companies. Mainly, the AI models draw data from everywhere to train and answer users’ queries and prompts. Per the filing, Universal Group alleges that Anthropic not only distributes but trains its models with the copyrighted lyrics.
While Anthropic argued that what Claude does is similar to what lyrics platforms like Genius do, UMG countered that the website contents are copyrighted. To the publishers, the continued use of the AI model means financial losses on their end.
By distributing the lyrics without permission, they continued, “Anthropic’s copyright infringement is not innovation; in layman’s terms, it’s theft.” In addition, the complaints said Anthropic has the power to block copyright infringements.
The AI company, backed by Amazon and Google, said it uses a set of rules called “constitutional AI” to train its AI models. The company added that it takes safety and trust seriously.
Since the surge in popularity, prominent artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have faced several lawsuits. Many of the lawsuits accuse the platforms of infringing data protection and copyright laws.
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