AI company Anthropic is employing the same rhetoric as Napster and Grokster back in the early days of digital music, relying on “tired and rejected arguments” that have been used to justify rampant copyright infringement many times before. Those arguments ultimately failed back then and they should fail now.
That is the message of an amicus brief submitted as part of the ongoing legal battle between a group of music publishers and the AI company. The brief is backed by an assortment of US music industry organisations together representing artists, songwriters and record labels, as well as publishers. They say that Anthropic's claims that licensing the content used to train its AI models would be impractical, and stop important technological advances, simply don't stack up.
The music publishers accuse Amazon-backed Anthropic of using their lyrics to train AI chatbot Claude without getting permission and therefore infringing the copyright in those lyrics.
Anthropic counters that training AI models with existing content constitutes ‘fair use’ under American copyright law, meaning no permission is required, a position the music industry strongly rejects. That’s not the only argument the music industry takes issue with.
The amicus brief says that Anthropic has “touted the potential of AI technology and suggested that an injunction against infringers such as Anthropic would supposedly threaten technological progress”. But these are “scare-tactic arguments”, the music organisations insist.
The “false choice” presented by Anthropic “between compliance with copyright law and technological progress is a well-worn, losing policy argument previously made by other mass infringers such as Napster and Grokster in their heyday”.
That false choice is disproven, they add, by the fact that, since the file-sharing days of the early 2000s, plenty of legitimate fully licensed digital music services have enjoyed success. And they, like the AI companies, need access to huge quantities of music.
“In music streaming, on-demand services including Spotify and Apple Music have negotiated and entered into licences for tens of millions of sound recordings”, the brief says.
“Audiovisual services such as YouTube, and fitness services like Peloton, have licensed millions of recordings and songs. Lyrics services have likewise licensed the lyrics to millions of songs - the very same works that Anthropic used but chose not to license - a fact that was admitted by Anthropic’s own witness”.
And there is nothing unique about a generative AI business when it comes to licensing content, the brief adds. It then cites various technology companies which have licensed content for AI training. NVIDIA has partnered with Getty Images, Google with Reddit, and YouTube with the major record companies.
And even OpenAI, while also fighting its own copyright lawsuits over the unlicensed sections of its training dataset, has nevertheless entered into licensing deals with various news and media organisations.
“These examples belie Anthropic’s claim that its purported need to copy millions of works renders compliance impossible”, the brief says, adding that the fact some AI companies are licensing content proves that forcing Anthropic to respect copyright law won’t negatively impact on the development of AI technologies more generally.
Indeed, enforcing Anthropic's copyright obligations “will help level the playing field for Anthropic’s competitors that pay for copyrighted content that Anthropic takes for free, and encourage AI development in a sustainable manner”.
The music publishers initially sued Anthropic in Tennessee, but a judge there transferred the case to California, the state where the AI company is based and where a number of the other big copyright cases against AI companies have been filed.
The organisations endorsing the new amicus brief include the Recording Industry Association Of America, the National Music Publishers’ Association, Songwriters Of North America, the Black Music Action Coalition, the Music Artists Coalition, the Artist Rights Alliance and the
American Association Of Independent Music.