• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, October 19, 2023

The tricky issue of AI and copyrights is being tested in a lawsuit filed Wednesday by numerous music publishers.  

Companies ranging from Universal Music to Capital CMG filed suit against Anthropic PBC, charging that their copyrights are being violated -- or could be -- by the AI firm. The case is on file with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division.

The complaint alleges that Anthropic scrapes and ingests “massive amounts of text from the internet and potentially other sources, and then using that vast corpus to train its AI models and generate output based on this copied text.” 

What then? Don’t hold your breath. 

“When a user prompts Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot to provide the lyrics to songs such as ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’ ‘God Only Knows,’ ‘What a Wonderful World,’ ‘Gimme Shelter,’ ‘American Pie,’ ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ ‘Every Breath You Take,’ ‘Life Is a Highway,’ ‘Somewhere Only We Know,’ ‘Halo,’ ‘Moves Like Jagger,’ ‘Uptown Funk,’ or any other number of Publishers’ musical compositions, the chatbot will provide responses that contain all or significant portions of those lyrics,” it continues.

That’s some list of songs, but nothing compared to the roster presented in an attachment.

Now this problem is not limited to music. Any publisher with a news presence and an archive may find their content being misused. Small local media that can’t afford big-ticket law firms may have limited recourse. 

What is the law here? The plaintiffs argue that it is simple. 

“Although the AI technology involved in this case may be complex and cutting-edge, the legal issues presented here are straightforward and long-standing. A defendant cannot reproduce, distribute, and display someone else’s copyrighted works to build its own business unless it secures permission from the rightsholder.”

The complaint continues that, “This foundational rule of copyright law dates all the way back to the Statute of Anne in 1710, and it has been applied time and time again to numerous infringing technological developments in the centuries since." 

The publishers in this case are asking for statuary damages up to $150,000 per work infringed and up to $25,000 per violation, plus an order requiring that any content absorbed in this process be destroyed. 

We were unable to get comment from Anthropic at deadline, but we assume they are going to respond with a robust answer to this complaint. The judge will be up late at night trying to unravel this complicated issue.