Music Publishers Filed First Lawsuit against AI

Universal Music Group leads a music publishers’ group charge in a $75M lawsuit against the Amazon-backed AI firm, Anthropic, for mass copyright infringement.  

In a high-profile move that is sending shockwaves through the entertainment industries, Universal Music Group, alongside Concord Music Group and ABKCO, have taken legal action against the AI firm, Anthropic, for mass copyright infringements. The AI company, supported by e-commerce giant Amazon, is the $75M lawsuit for allegedly ripping off lyrics from renowned artists like the Rolling Stones, Beyoncé, and Katy Perry.

This development marks another significant moment in the ongoing tension between the entertainment and creative industries and the rapidly expanding technologies of generative artificial intelligence. Hollywood giants contend that their intellectual property rights are being violated as AI systems are trained using their copyrighted materials.

The lawsuit, filed in Tennessee federal court, accusing Anthropic's actions as a "systematic and widespread infringement". It alleges that the company has copied and shared lyrics from no less than 500 songs without obtaining the necessary permissions.

While it is the first lawsuit against an AI company from music publishers, this is not an isolated case against AI entities. Just last month, the Authors Guild, which represents illustrious fiction writers like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The claim suggests OpenAI has embarked on a "systematic course of mass-scale copyright infringement", leveraging copyrighted books to train its sophisticated GPT series.

Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude, is cited as prime evidence of the company's infringements. When prompted, Claude provided nearly identical copies of song lyrics owned by Concord. The publishers argue that Anthropic is sidestepping an established market where lyrics are licensed, and thus unjustly benefiting from others' creative works. Such actions, according to the claim, harm songwriters and diminish the potential of existing and future licensing markets.

To weaken Anthropic's potential fair use defense, the publishers have pointed to a recent Supreme Court decision in the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith case. The ruling emphasized the importance of commercial motives in copyright infringement cases. With this lawsuit, music publishers are clearly aiming to underscore the financial damages due to unauthorized use of their lyrics by the AI systems.

The ramifications of these alleged infringements are substantial. The music publishers are pushing for a court injunction against Anthropic’s use of their copyrighted material and seeking damages that could be up to $150,000 per infringement.

Matthew Oppenheim, the attorney representing the music publishers, emphasized the gravity of the situation, “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 rightsholders.”