Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
There is anthropic settled and several music publishers agreed to stop showing users lyrics based on copyrighted songs. Back in 2023, it was an AI company sued by Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and others after it was discovered that its Claude chatbot would return lyrics to songs like Beyoncé’s “Halo” when requested.
The entertainment industry is one of the most contentious industries out there and fights fiercely to protect copyright—just look at historical events from the demise of Napster to Viacom’s years-long legal battle against YouTube. A recent popular lyric annotation website was Rap Genius (now just called Genius). sued For reproduction of song lyrics copyrighted by the National Association of Music Publishers.
The music publishers suing Anthropic acknowledged that other websites, such as the music annotation platform Genius, distributed the lyrics online, but noted that Genius eventually began paying licensing fees to publish them on its site.
In this latest suit, the music publishers alleged that Anthropic took the lyrics off the Internet and intentionally removed watermarks posted on lyric websites to help identify where the copyrighted material was published. Once Genius started licensing lyrics from music publishers, it did it smartly extra apostrophes are included include the words in the text so that if the material is copied inappropriately, Genius will know that the material for which it has expressly paid has been stolen and can request that it be removed.
Anthropic did not accept the allegations, but as part of the settlement, it agreed to better maintain safeguards that prevent its AI models from infringing copyrighted material. It will also work in good faith with music publishers when safeguards are found to be ineffective.
anthropic defended The act of using song lyrics and other copyrighted material to train AI models The Hollywood Reporter“Our decision to enter into this condition is consistent with those priorities. We look forward to demonstrating that using potential copyrighted material in the training of generative AI models is a fundamental fair use under current copyright law.” This argument has been central to AI companies’ defense of copyrighted material appearing in their models. Rights activists argue that from websites such as remixing copyrighted content New York Times constitutes fair use as long as it is materially modified by derivative works.
News and music publishers disagree, and the lawsuit against Anthropic is far from over. The music publishers are still seeking an injunction preventing Anthropic from training future models on any copyrighted music lyrics.
Concerns about abuse stem from the potential for Anthropic models to be used in musical generation, causing the musician to lose control of their craft. This is not an unwarranted concern, as it is widely speculated that OpenAI is imitating Scarlett Johansson’s voice after she refused to submit her voice for an AI voice model.
Tech companies like OpenAI and Google make their money from platforms and network effects, not from selling copyrighted material, which has always been a source of tension between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Art is simply “content” designed to serve the larger purpose of building engagement and selling advertising. The field of artificial intelligence flooding Facebook today reflects what tech companies see as interchangeable.
Publishers like it Time It has been fighting high-profile court battles against the likes of OpenAI to prevent copyrighted material from being seized. OpenAI has tried to respond by licensing material from some companies, and another AI player, Perplexity, has begun experimenting with a revenue-sharing model. But publishers want more control and don’t want to be forced into these jerky deals that could end at any time and still drive people away from their websites. This is far from the end of the story when it comes to disputes over copyrighted material in major language models.
