Anthropic also maintains that the plaintiffs cannot prove irreparable harm, as there is no evidence that song licensing revenues have decreased since Claude's launch. The company argues that the publishers' request for an injunction is overbroad and unjustified, and that the lawsuit was filed in the wrong jurisdiction. The copyright battle in the generative AI industry continues to intensify, with more artists joining lawsuits against AI companies, and platforms like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI pledging legal defenses for users of AI-generated content.
Key takeaways:
- Anthropic, a generative AI startup, is facing a lawsuit from music publishers including Concord, Universal, and ABKCO, who accuse it of copyright infringement over its chatbot Claude's use of scraped song lyrics to train its AI models.
- In its defense, Anthropic argues that its use of the lyrics is transformative and constitutes fair use, and that the lyrics make up only a minuscule fraction of its training data. It also claims that licensing the vast amounts of text needed to train AI models is technically and financially infeasible.
- Anthropic further argues that the plaintiffs themselves, not the company, engaged in the volitional conduct required for direct infringement liability, as they caused its AI model to produce the infringing content.
- Anthropic also contests the plaintiffs' claims of irreparable harm, asserting that they have not provided evidence of decreased song licensing revenues or certain and immediate qualitative harms since the launch of Claude. It also argues that the requested injunction is overbroad and unjustified, and that the lawsuit was filed in the wrong jurisdiction.