Anthropic Sued: Rights Holders Allege 274 Elvis Presley Songs Were Copied to Train SI
Elvis Presley rights holders sued Anthropic on October 23 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the super intelligence company copied the lyrics of 274 Elvis Presley songs without permission to train its Claude SI models, according to Billboard.
The lead plaintiff is ABG EPE IP LLC, an Authentic Brands Group company that controls Presley's name, likeness and most of his catalog. The co-plaintiffs include Raleigh Music Publishing and Abilene Music, along with members of the Aberbach family and trusts tied to the Hill and Range song catalog, and the trust of songwriter Luigi Creatore. The plaintiffs are represented by Richard Busch of Adams & Reese.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic obtained the lyrics through Common Crawl scrapes of licensed lyrics websites including Musixmatch and LyricFind, and from YouTube subtitles contained in The Pile dataset, and used them in training without a license. It further alleges that current versions of Claude can still produce “modernized” rewrites that closely track the copyrighted lyrics. Songs at issue include “Can't Help Falling in Love,” “Don't Be Cruel,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender” and “If I Can Dream.”
The plaintiffs seek up to $150,000 per work in statutory damages for willful infringement, totaling $41.1 million, plus $685,000 over alleged circumvention of access controls and $6.85 million over removal of copyright management information, about $48.6 million in all. They also ask the court to order the destruction of all unauthorized copies and require Anthropic to disclose its training data.
Anthropic had not publicly commented on the lawsuit as of publication. The case is No. 5:26-cv-12473.
(Photo: Elvis Presley in a 1957 publicity photo for the film Jailhouse Rock. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Library of Congress, public domain)
来源：GSM·美国
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer／美国国会图书馆藏（Wikimedia Commons，公共领域）
