Attorneys for artificial intelligence firm Anthropic were in court on Oct. 21, as the company seeks to fend off a lawsuit by music publishers alleging that it stole their song lyrics to train its AI model, Claude.
The music publishers, led by Concord Music Group, sued in 2023, alleging that the Claude model is violating copyright law and undercutting the market for human-created music. Anthropic has argued that using the copyrighted works is legal and there is no evidence it harms the market.
The two sides traded arguments in a lengthy hearing before Judge Eumi Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Oct. 21 at a San Jose, California, courthouse. The parties were unable to get through all their motions and cross motions during the Oct. 21 hearing, and Lee has asked them to consider continuation days later this month or in early November.
This is the latest development in a slew of AI-based litigation, as musicians, writers, photographers, and newspapers continue to file legal challenges to stop AI companies from using their work without compensation.
Concord and the other publishers told the judge Anthropic is harming their bottom lines by depriving them of licensing revenue every time it provides song lyrics for free.
Web users can find song lyrics with an internet search, but the sites that provide them have to pay the music publishers a licensing fee.
The publishers, led by attorney Matt Oppenheim, said that Anthropic does not pay and that its activity cripples a growing licensing market. When other businesses see that Anthropic has access to the lyrics for free, that harms the publishers’ ability to negotiate licensing fees, they argued.
Anthropic has defended itself by saying that using the song lyrics to train Claude counts as “fair use,” a legal doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted work under certain circumstances.
The company also said the lyrics are just part of a vast body of work it fed into Claude during the training process, and it said that if the model wanted to create an “endless stream” of new song lyrics just by referencing works in the public domain, it could do so.
Attorney Sonal Mehta, arguing for Anthropic, said there was no evidence on the record showing that Claude was specifically designed to output copyrighted song lyrics.
That would make it “the world’s most expensive lyric-generating machine,” she said, since a simple Google search can turn up the same lyrics.
Anthropic also argued that it had put in place “guardrails” to help prevent Claude from outputting identical duplicates of copyrighted work. Just because investigators were able to “jailbreak” Claude’s coding to find a way around those protections doesn’t mean the company is at fault, Mehta said.
But the music publishers countered that most of those guardrails were put in place only after they sued.
It’s unclear whether Lee will issue a bench decision in the case or allow it to go to a jury trial. The publishers have asked for up to $150,000 in compensation for each of the 499 songs they say were stolen.
Anthropic faces another suit by the same publishers in a separate case, alleging the company acquired their work through illegal torrent sites. In that case, the number of allegedly stolen works is more than 20,000.
Earlier this year, a judge also approved a $1.5 billion settlement after authors and book publishers sued Anthropic under similar circumstances. The judge in that case ruled that using the books to train Claude was fair use but said Anthropic had illegally acquired pirated copies of some of those books from the internet.
