New Delhi: The rights-holders to Elvis Presley’s music have filed a new lawsuit alleging that Anthropic stole 274 songs off his iconic catalogue for training its models.
Authentic Brands Group, the licensing organization that owns both Presley’s music and likeness, filed their lawsuit against Anthropic on 23 October, reported Billboard. The list of songs included in the lawsuit contain classic hits like “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “A Little Less Conversation” along with several deep cuts like Little Less,” and “Return to Sender”. The lawsuit is seeking $150,000 per infringed song, which amounts to roughly $41 million in total.
“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,” Richard Busch, the lead attorney behind the lawsuit, writes in the filing. “The Elvis Plaintiffs are deeply protective of these iconic songs.”
Busch argues that Claude, Anthropic’s flagship model, essentially creates derivatives of songs that are not distinct enough from their inspirations to count as their own unique works.
“Even after the Defendant supposedly put up ‘guardrails’ after being sued, in one of its latest iterations, Claude continues to infringe: when recently asked to recreate specific songs ‘for a modern audience,’ Claude did so and admitted: ‘These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges. That’s edging past ‘inspired by’ into reproducing the copyrighted song, even when the words are swapped out,” read the lawsuit.
The ‘Defendant’ in this context refers to Anthropic, a company that continues to face several similar lawsuits despite efforts to change their models to avoid reproducing copyrighted material.
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The legal legacy of an artist
Among other similar lawsuits, this one stands out because the prosecution is representing the estate of a single artist, in contrast to previous suits which were on behalf of dominant music publishers like Sony Music and Warner Music Group, who also have active lawsuits going against Anthropic.
The attorney leading this suit is highly experienced in handling similar cases. Richard Busch had also represented Eminem in landmark cases in the 2000s over digital piracy. And more importantly, won a highly controversial verdict for the estate of Marvin Gaye in 2018, where it was ruled that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’s song “Blurred Lines” infringed on Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.”
The latter ruling has influenced most music copyright cases in US courts ever since. With the latter case having the same fundamental arguments as the Anthropic suit on the illegality of “unlicensed derivative works”.