As reported by Reuters, three music publishers asked a federal court judge to issue a preliminary injunction preventing artificial intelligence company Anthropic from reproducing or distributing their copyrighted song lyrics.
A preliminary injunction is a court order that may be granted before or during a trial to stop one party from doing something that could harm the other party or status quo.
Universal Music, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music filed a motion on November 16th, 2023, asking for the court to require Anthropic to "implement effective guardrails" that would prevent the company's AI models from reproducing or distributing the copyrighted song lyrics and to halt the company from using these works to train future AI models.
The publishers filed a suit against Anthropic on October 18th, 2023, which accused Anthropic of "systematic and widespread" infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics. The publishers claim Anthropic used the copyrighted lyrics to "innumerable" songs without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train its artificial intelligence assistant, known as "Claude," to respond to human prompts.
According to Reuters, the publishers allege Anthropic "profits richly" from infringing their repertoires of copyrighted works, achieving a valuation of $5 billion while paying "nothing" to publishers or their songwriters.
The publishers have asked the court for monetary damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and an order to stop the alleged infringement.
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