Anthropic has partly resolved a legal disagreement that caused the ai startup to draw the ire of the music industry. In October 2023, a group of music publishers, including Universal Music and ABKCO, filed a copyright infringement complaint against Anthropic. The group alleged that the company had trained its Claude ai model on at least 500 songs to which they had rights and that, when promoted, Claude could play the lyrics of those tracks partially or completely. Among the song lyrics that publishers said Anthropic had infringed were Beyoncé's “Halo” and Maroon 5's “Moves Like Jagger.”
In a court-approved stipulation the two sides reached on Thursday, Anthropic agreed to maintain its existing guardrails against products that reproduce, distribute or display copyrighted material owned by publishers and implement those same measures by training its future ai models.
At the same time, the company said it would respond “promptly” to any copyright concerns from the group and promised to provide written responses detailing how and when it plans to address their concerns. In cases where the company intends not to address an issue, it must clearly state its intention to do so.
“Claude is not designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes designed to prevent such infringement,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Engadget. “Our decision to enter into this stipulation is consistent with those priorities. We continue to hope to demonstrate that, under existing copyright law, the use of potentially copyrighted material in training generative ai models is a legal use. legitimate par excellence”.
As mentioned, Thursday's pact does not fully resolve the original disagreement between Anthropic and the group of music publishers that sued the company. The latter party is still seeking an injunction against Anthropic to prevent it from using unauthorized copies of song lyrics to train future ai models. A decision on that matter could come sometime in the coming months.
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