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The
lawsuit said Anthropic violates the publishers' rights through
its use of lyrics from at least 500 songs ranging from the Beach
Boys' "God Only Knows" and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter"
to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk" and Beyonce's
"Halo."
Representatives for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a
request for comment.
The publishers' attorney Matt Oppenheim declined to comment on
the litigation but said it is "well-established by copyright law
that an entity cannot reproduce, distribute, and display someone
else's copyrighted works to build its own business unless it
secures permission from rightsholders."
Many copyright owners including authors and visual artists have
sued tech companies such as Meta Platforms and Microsoft-backed
OpenAI over the use of their work to train generative-AI
systems.
The music publishers' lawsuit appears to be the first case over
song lyrics and the first against Anthropic, which has drawn
financial backing from Google, Amazon and former cryptocurrency
billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.
The lawsuit accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers'
copyrights by copying their lyrics without permission as part of
the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet
to train Claude to respond to human prompts.
The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the
lyrics by request, and in response to "a whole range of prompts
that do not seek Publishers' lyrics," including "requests to
write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions
for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short
fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter."
For example, the lawsuit said that Claude will provide relevant
lyrics from Don McLean's "American Pie" when asked to write a
song about the death of rock pioneer Buddy Holly.
The publishers asked the court for money damages and an order to
stop the alleged infringement.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David
Bario and Bill Berkrot)
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