Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company backed by Amazon (AMZN), has scored an early victory in its tussle with music publishers after a California judge on Tuesday rejected a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group (UMGNF) and others.
According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said the publishers failed to show Anthropic’s use of copyright lyrics to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude caused them “irreparable harm.”
“Publishers are essentially asking the Court to define the contours of a licensing market for AI training where the threshold question of fair use remains unsettled,” the news agency reported the judge as saying.
UMG, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023, alleging it had infringed copyrights from at least 500 songs.
One of Many Such Cases
It comes as AI companies, including Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI stare down accusations that they have used copyrighted material to train AI models. While they argue they are making “fair use” of copyrighted material under U.S. copyright law, publishers, authors and other owners disagree.
In January, a court filing alleged Mark Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of “pirated” versions of copyright-protected books from the Library Genesis dataset to train the company’s artificial intelligence models.
On Thursday March 20, The Atlantic published a searchable version of LibGen that contained over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers, as part of its investigation into the Library Genesis data set.
“As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rights holders of all the works it has been exploiting,” the Society of Authors said in a statement. “This is yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide.”
In November, a New York judge dismissed a lawsuit against OpenAI that claimed it misused articles from various news outlets to train its AI models.
In 2023, a number of authors including John Grisham and George RR Martin accused OpenAI of “systematic theft on a mass scale” over its use of copyrighted material.
Is UMGNF a Good Stock to Buy?
On Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on the stock, based on six Buys, three Holds and one Sell. The average UMGNF price target of $32.94 implies about 18% upside.
