Music Publishers Sue Anthropic Over Copyrighted Works
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence lab Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, according to TechCrunch. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the legal complaint alleges that the company conducted a deliberate campaign of illegally scraping, torrenting, and downloading copyrighted works.
The publishers claim that Anthropic engaged in blatant theft by utilizing thousands of copyrighted materials to train its Claude artificial intelligence models. An Anthropic spokesperson stated that the company disagrees with the claims made by the publishers and intends to defend itself robustly in court.
This legal action follows previous intellectual property lawsuits against Anthropic. Some of the legal representation involved in the current case also worked on prior copyright actions brought by authors and music groups, including a notable case resulting in a significant financial penalty after a court ruled that acquiring content through piracy was unlawful.
The latest complaint expands upon previous arguments by accusing Anthropic of utilizing illegal torrenting methods to secure millions of copies of books containing song lyrics and sheet music. The case highlights ongoing legal friction between content creators and artificial intelligence developers regarding data acquisition practices for model training.
Based on reporting by techcrunch.com.
