A federal court has rebuffed a bid from a trio of music publishers suing Anthropic to stop the use of their lyrics to train the Amazon-backed company’s AI system.
U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee on Tuesday found that Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group and ABKCO didn’t prove that the existing licensing market is being undercut by Anthropic pilfering their material without consent or payment. She also pointed to concerns regarding the “enforceability and manageability” of a court order that would require the company to rebuild future training models due to the “enormous and seemingly ever-expanding scope” of works that the case concerns. If the injunction was granted, it would’ve extended to hundreds of thousands of songs owned by the music publishers.
In a statement, Universal Music Group said it remains “very confident in our case against Anthropic more broadly.” It added that Anthropic “already conceded the merits of our claims against its infringing outputs of our copyrighted song lyrics, by entering into a stipulation requiring it to maintain ‘guardrails’ to prevent such infringing outputs, thereby resolving a critical aspect of the motion in our favor.”
At the heart of the lawsuit, filed in Tennessee federal court in 2023, are allegations that Anthropic copied lyrics from artists such as Katy Perry, the Rolling Stones and Beyoncé to build its AI model. When asked the lyrics to Perry’s “Roar,” for example, the company’s AI chatbot Claude provided an near-identical copy of the words in the piece.
The publishers sought a sweeping court order that would temporarily block Anthropic from using lyrics owned by the publishers moving forward.
In Tuesday’s ruling, the court stressed the “unknowable universe of songs” that the injunction would apply to. It said that it doesn’t have “unfettered discretion” to issue such an order.
“Publishers did not offer a concrete or definitive way for Anthropic – as the party subject to the injunction and the legal repercussions of a violation – to ascertain its parameters or comply with its terms,” Lee wrote.
Anthropic maintained that excluding an undefined amount of material from its training library would be “virtually impossible” and would require it to “have to undertake constant efforts to update the corpus, and restart the future model’s training process.”
Earlier this year, Anthropic and music publishers reached a deal to maintain existing guardrails that prevent Claude from providing lyrics to songs they own or create new song lyrics based on the copyrighted material.
More to come…