· ai-devtools
Elvis rightsholders sue Anthropic for copyright infringement over song use in AI models
A coalition of rights holders controlling Elvis Presley songs has initiated legal action against Anthropic.
They contend that the artificial intelligence firm misappropriated The King's material to train its AI models.
The complaint, submitted last Friday to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, asserts that "The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the Defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before."
The lawsuit employs a literary allusion, comparing the situation to Shakespeare. The filing argues, "Defendant Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet."
It further contends that instead of waiting for the "infinite" time suggested by the infinite monkey theorem, "Anthropic found a workaround." Specifically, the complaint asserts, "Rather than training its monkeys from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit."
The legal action mirrors existing concerns regarding AI training data, raising several points. These include that "Fair use doctrines don’t apply to all content used to train AI models," and that Anthropic should have been aware some datasets used were either licensed or stolen.
The plaintiffs also argue that Anthropic needed a license before allowing Claude to generate Elvis song lyrics upon prompting. Moreover, they contend that chatbots incur costs for rights-holders when users ask them to create content "in the style of" copyrighted artists.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages and a share of Anthropic's revenue, demanding "$150,000 per work," which totals $41.1 million in damages.
Anthropic has reportedly committed to defending itself in the matter. This follows a prior resolution where the company faced accusations of training models on books without author permission, for which it established a $1.5 billion fund. The plaintiffs suggest Anthropic's substantial cash reserves mean it can afford to address these claims by paying up.
