Anthropic, AI Company Backed by Amazon & $4Bn, Sued by UMG, Rights Group
Get ready. The War of the (”A.I.”) Worlds is beginning.
Yesterday (10/18), a lawsuit was filed against Anthropic, an A.I. development company backed by Amazon, by an army of music labels, publishing groups, and communication companies, both domestically in the United States and internationally around the world. Anthropic’s “A.I.” program is named Claude, which Anthropic calls “part-ChatGPT rival and part-content creation engine.”
The nature of this lawsuit is not only peculiar, but it seems like the first big battle of the corporate giants in regards to how “A.I.” can and will be used in the future with respect to current day copyright laws.
Plaintiffs argue that these “A.I.” models are built upon copyrighted material. Specifically, if you asked a generative “A.I.” technology to give you the lyrics to a specific song (Plaintiffs cited works from “Gimmie Shelter” by The Rolling Stones to “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars), it will give you the lyrics to those works, which are copyrighted and owned by the respective rights agencies that control them. The Plaintiffs gave numerous examples of organizations paying for the creative rights to any aspects, with my favorite being that lyric websites should and do in fact pay for the rights to display song lyrics.
This isn’t a revolutionary finding when it comes to “A.I.” models, but that line of “how much of this is generative vs. how much is it copyrighted material” is getting a clearer definition, and I hear the fears from all sides of creation. From the musicians in real life and from the musicians on the internet. Will “A.I.”
Hopefully, this is a step in the right direction.
Sourceshttps://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ai-company-anthropic-amazon-sued-universal-music-group/
Read the lawsuit in it’s entiretyhttps://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/files/2023/10/UMG-lawsuit.pdf
Check out Anthropic