Anthropic Faces a Lyrics Copyright Test That Fair Use May Not Solve
Anthropic Faces a Lyrics Copyright Test That Fair Use May Not Solve
A federal court in San Jose is preparing to hear a dispute that puts one of generative AI’s most consequential defenses under pressure: fair use.
The case, led by Concord Music Group and other publishers, alleges that Anthropic trained Claude on copyrighted lyrics without permission. In a separate claim, the publishers say the company drew on pirated copies of 20,517 musical works obtained from torrent sites—an allegation that makes the provenance of the training data as important as the model’s eventual output.
The publishers’ complaint focuses on what users can get back from Claude. Their investigator, they say, asked for “a song about the death of Buddy Holly” and received a verbatim rendering of Don McLean’s American Pie lyrics. They argue such results undercut lyric websites that pay to license and display the same text.
Anthropic’s answer is twofold. It says the training use is protected by fair use because the material is transformed in the creation of an AI system, and it says Claude has copyright-protective features designed to limit direct reproduction. When a user nevertheless prompts a system to create a copy, the company argues, responsibility lies with the user: “The user does.”
That argument arrives after Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book publishers, a case in which a judge accepted fair use for training but treated the use of pirated books as a separate problem. The music publishers are pressing the same fault line, seeking up to $150,000 per alleged copyright violation, plus $25,000 where copyright notices were allegedly removed.
A recent Third Circuit ruling against ROSS Intelligence in a Thomson Reuters case gives the publishers fresh ammunition, though the California court is in the Ninth Circuit and is not bound by it. The looming question is narrower—and more damaging for AI firms—than whether models can learn from copyrighted work: whether they can do so from allegedly stolen copies while competing with the market those works support.
Write a comment