Anthropic has asked a US court to dismiss a group of music publishers’ request for an injunction to force the AI company to prevent its chatbot Claude from spitting out their song lyrics and to ensure that their songs are not used in any future AI training.
In a legal filing earlier this month, the music companies claimed that Anthropic had “already usurped publishers’ and songwriters’ control over the use of their works, denied them credit, and compromised their reputations.” If Anthropic were allowed to continue using song lyrics, the publishers said, the “wanton copying” would “irreversibly harm the song lyrics licensing market, publishers’ relationships with licensees, and publishers’ reputations with the songwriters they represent.”
While the publishers’ broader lawsuit plays out in court, they want a judge to force an immediate end to what they believe is Anthropic’s copyright infringement: both the use of their song lyrics in the AI company’s training data sets and the alleged output of their song lyrics by Claude.
Anthropic denies that the use of the publishers’ works in its training processes constitutes copyright infringement, and denies that Claude outputs the publishers’ texts except when the publishers themselves enter very specific guiding principles. However, other arguments are currently being made as to why the publishers’ request for an injunction should be denied.
The injunction must be denied for two reasons, Anthropic says in a new court filing. First, the company argues that it has already voluntarily taken steps to ensure that Claude does not publish existing song lyrics, even if publishers provide very specific instructions.
Second, if Anthropic is indeed found liable for copyright infringement at the end of the legal proceedings, the publishers will receive damages. These damages represent fair compensation for the harm they have suffered as a result of the alleged copyright infringement.
The publishers themselves, it says, have “actually admitted that the additional protections put in place by Anthropic are effective” in preventing Claude from publishing existing lyrics. This claim is based on the fact that the publishers’ injunction is simply seeking to require that these existing protections be maintained. Therefore, the music companies “cannot prove any ongoing or future harm,” Anthropic argues, “let alone ‘irreparable’ harm.”
As for the injunction against the use of publishers’ song lyrics in Anthropic’s training, it says the dispute over whether AI companies must obtain permission to use existing content when training their models is at the heart of “approximately two dozen copyright infringement cases across the country,” and in no other case did copyright holders seek an injunction.
And this includes the lawsuits filed by major record companies against Suno And Audio samples. Universal Music is involved in these cases through the label side of its business and in this one through its music publishing division. “It speaks volumes that no other plaintiff – including the record label of the parent company of one of the plaintiffs in this case – has sought an injunction against this conduct,” Anthropic writes.
Furthermore, Anthropic argues, the behavior of the publishers themselves shows that the argument that urgent action was needed to stop the harm caused by Claude is not credible. When they found out that Claude could be induced to release existing song lyrics, they did not inform Anthropic, but withheld this information for five months before filing suit.
They then filed their lawsuit in Tennessee, which Anthropic says was clearly the wrong court, causing another self-inflicted delay after the AI company successfully got the trial moved to California. The publishers took this risk, it says, because they thought they would benefit from fighting the case in Tennessee. This “failed attempt to manipulate the trial is entirely of their own making and, by itself, justifies the denial of their motion” for a preliminary injunction.
This is Anthropic’s second court filing this month related to its legal battle with the publishers. In a previous filing, it asked the court to dismiss copyright claims related to Claude’s publication of song lyrics, as well as allegations that Anthropic mishandled copyright management information. That would mean the only remaining dispute would be Anthropic’s use of copyrighted song lyrics in its training processes.
