Anthropic Settles Authors’ Copyright Lawsuit

Anthropic has reached a settlement with the US authors who alleged the AI company illegally trained its Claude chatbot on their copyrighted books. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

Why this matters for the music industry:

• Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO are pursuing their own copyright lawsuit against Anthropic.

• They allege the Claude chatbot regurgitated copyrighted lyrics, proving that it had been trained on their lyrics without permission.

• The music publishers’ case may be aided by the evidence gathered in the authors’ lawsuit, which demonstrated that Anthropic downloaded millions of files from pirate websites for training purposes.

• In June, US District Judge William Alsup ruled that AI training on materials downloaded from pirate websites is not considered “fair use.”

• One of the sites used by Anthropic, LibGen, contains illegal copies of sheet music, songbooks and other lyric-related books, including works involved in the publishers’ lawsuit such as “Tiny Dancer” (written by Elton John and Bernie Taupin), “A Thousand Miles” (written by Vanessa Carlton) and “7 Rings” (recorded by Ariana Grande).

• As per Music Business Worldwide, the music publishers are now seeking to amend their complaint “to include new charges against Anthropic for distributing copyrighted lyrics without a license, not just using them for training.”