\n<\/p>\n
All AI wants for Christmas is a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for it, according to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind the Claude chatbot.<\/p>\n
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, music publishers who manage the copyright of songs on behalf of songwriters and composers, are seeking damages for alleged misuse of \u201ctens of thousands\u201d of copyrighted works by Anthropic.<\/p>\n
The compositions include Mariah Carey\u2019s All I Want for Christmas is You, Ain\u2019t No Mountain High Enough, originally performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, and Survivor\u2019s Eye of the Tiger.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs claim they are victims of \u201cone of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history\u201d.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit, filed in a California court, targets Anthropic and its chief executive, Dario Amodei, as well as co-founder Benjamin Mann. It alleges the defendants breached copyright law by \u201ctorrenting, scraping and downloading\u201d lyrics from copyrighted works to train its family of Claude AI models \u2013 as well as reproducing those lyrics in responses to users\u2019 prompts.<\/p>\n
It claims that Mann and Anthropic downloaded at least 7m copies of books from pirate websites, including the lyrics and sheet music to songs such as Bon Jovi\u2019s Livin\u2019 on a Prayer and Leonard Cohen\u2019s Hallelujah.<\/p>\n
The figures are from a recent copyright case against Anthropic brought by US authors which the company settled for $1.5bn.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit, filed on 28 August, was first reported by trade publication Music Business Worldwide. Other songs allegedly having their copyright infringed included Mark Ronson\u2019s Uptown Funk and Katy Perry\u2019s California Gurls.<\/p>\n
It also claims that Anthropic acquired copies of songs in other ways including scraping lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, and datasets on archive sites such as Common Crawl. In another section of the claim, the publishers allege that Anthropic stripped identifying information from songs while processing the texts, which denied copyright owners \u201cvaluable attribution\u201d to their work.<\/p>\n
\u201cDefendants specifically elected to harvest unauthorized copies of Music Publishers\u2019 works so that they would not have to pay Music Publishers a licensing fee to use their works in AI training and development,\u201d said the plaintiffs.<\/p>\n
The music publishers are seeking damages that could run into billions of dollars, based on a claim of up to $150,000 per infringed piece of work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data.<\/p>\n
The suit implies at least 20,000 works are involved in the suit, referring to the unlawful copying of \u201ctens of thousands of Music Publishers\u2019 copyrighted musical compositions\u201d.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotionFree newsletter | Every weekday<\/p>\n
Sign up to Business Today<\/span><\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Ed Newton-Rex, a UK-based composer and campaigner for protecting artists\u2019 copyright, said he was \u201cnot surprised\u201d that rights holders were defending themselves against a company with a \u201chistory of downloading and training their AI models on huge libraries\u201d.<\/p>\n Alongside the authors\u2019 lawsuit, Anthropic has also faced claims from Universal Music Group and Concord Music Group.<\/p>\n In a separate case this month, AI music generator Suno lost a copyright infringement case against German licensing agency GEMA, which alleged illegal use of songs including Boney M\u2019s Daddy Cool to train its technology.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for Anthropic, which is preparing for a stockmarket listing that could value the company at $2tn, said: \u201cWe disagree with the publishers\u2019 claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All AI wants for Christmas is a vast back catalogue of songs without paying for it, according to a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the startup behind the Claude chatbot. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, music publishers who manage the copyright of songs on behalf of songwriters and composers, are seeking damages for alleged misuse of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1038,7253,1545,686,2118,248,1358,2515,1152],"class_list":{"0":"post-52035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-alleged","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-industry","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-songs","13":"tag-sued","14":"tag-tens","15":"tag-theft","16":"tag-thousands"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}