Elvis rightsholders sue Anthropic for stealing songs and leaving them in Heartbreak Hotel
They want less chatbot talk and much more money from song royalties.
A group of people and companies that own or control the rights to Elvis Presley songs have sued Anthropic for copyright infringement. They say the AI company took Elvis's songs without permission to train its AI models.
“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,” says the complaint [PDF], filed last Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
The plaintiffs own the rights to 274 Elvis songs. Many of the song titles could be used as fitting comparisons for their complaints, but the lawsuit instead refers to a famous idea from Shakespeare.
“Defendant Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet,” the complaint states. “However, rather than wait out the ‘infinite’ amount of time the infinite monkey theorem posits is necessary for said monkeys with typewriters to randomly, one letter at a time, string together that famous question of ‘To be or not to be?’, Anthropic found a workaround.”
“Rather than training its monkeys from first principles, Anthropic found mimicry (i.e. copyright infringement) to be the much easier pursuit.”
The lawsuit makes several arguments that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed claims that AI companies collected large amounts of content to train their models:
Fair use rules do not cover every kind of content used to train AI models.
Anthropic should have known that some of the torrents and datasets it used to train its models were licensed, meaning they could not be used freely, or had been stolen.
The AI company should know that it needs a license before allowing its Claude products to do things such as produce Elvis song lyrics when users ask for them.
Chatbots can cost copyright owners money when users ask them to create content “in the style of” artists whose work is protected by copyright.
The plaintiffs want compensation and a share of Anthropic's profits, or $150,000 for each work. The second option would put the damages at $41.1 million.
Anthropic has reportedly said it will fight the case. However, it has already settled a similar case in which it was accused of training its models on books without asking the authors for permission or getting their approval. To settle that case, the AI startup set up a $1.5 billion fund to pay writers.
The plaintiffs point out that Anthropic has billions of dollars in cash and plans a major stock market listing, which it announced today. They argue that the company can afford to pay up. They make their point with a series of Elvis song titles: “A Little Less Conversation,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “The Devil In Disguise,” and “Patch It Up.” ®