Anthropic scores win in AI copyright dispute with record labels
Summary
Anthropic scored a win this week after a U.S. court denied an injunction that Universal Music Group and other record labels had sought to prevent the artificial-intelligence company from using copyrighted lyrics to train its AI models.
Anthropic scored a win this week after a U.S. court denied an injunction that Universal Music Group and other record labels had sought to prevent the artificial-intelligence company from using copyrighted lyrics to train its AI models.
Concord, ABKCO Music & Records, Universal Music and several subsidiaries sued Anthropic in October 2023, saying the company was harming them by using copyrighted material to train its AI chatbot, Claude. The record labels alleged that Claude’s responses to user queries contained verbatim or near-verbatim copies of the works, saying their reproduction violated copyright.
The music companies, which represent a large cohort of artists ranging from Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande to the Rolling Stones, said Anthropic infringed copyright in lyrics from at least 500 songs and sought a preliminary injunction that would prohibit the company from using the works to train its models.
However, a judge in California on Tuesday denied a motion for that injunction, saying the record labels hadn’t demonstrated how using the works to train Claude caused reputational or market-related harm, according to court records seen by The Wall Street Journal.
The record labels and Anthropic weren’t immediately available for comment.
Anthropic doesn’t meaningfully dispute that Claude’s training included copyrighted lyrics, the judge noted. The company said Claude’s intended purpose isn’t to reproduce existing works in response to user queries, but to generate original outputs, she added.
The case is the latest in a string of disputes between AI companies and publishers on whether and how easily accessible content like music or news can be used to train AI models. Publishers are moving to shield themselves from what they see as violations of their work from AI startups.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and the New York Post sued generative AI search-engine Perplexity for alleged copyright infringement, saying the company had used copyrighted news to generate responses to users’ queries, siphoning away traffic that would otherwise go to publishers’ websites.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is suing Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, arguing the companies used its content without permission to train their AI products.
News Corp, owner of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com
