Complete Music Update writes
AI company Anthropic has asked the judge overseeing its copyright legal battle with a group of music publishers to dismiss everything except one core issue, which is whether or not Anthropic committed copyright infringement by using lyrics to train its AI model without permission. In a filing which asks for what it calls ‘ancillary claims’ in the lawsuit filed by the music publishers to be dismissed, it also says that it will address that core copyright dispute in “due course”.
Those ancillary claims include Anthropic’s alleged liability for contributory and vicarious infringement. This, argue the publishers, comes about when Anthropic users output lyrics from its chatbot Claude that are very similar to those controlled by the publishers. There are also alleged violations of US law relating to the removal of copyright management information. In its latest legal filing, Anthropic says it wants to “prune away” these ancillary claims “which are facially implausible and supported by threadbare and conclusory allegations”.
What the court needs to focus on, says Anthropic, is “whether the use of copyrighted materials to extract statistical and factual context for the purpose of training generative AI models like Claude is a transformative fair use under copyright law”.
