Four organizations representing various publishers and content creators have filed an amicus brief supporting Concord Music Group in its copyright infringement lawsuit against AI giant Anthropic.
The case, Concord Music Group v. Anthropic, was brought in October 2023 by several music publishers alleging that Anthropic unlawfully used copyrighted musical works, particularly a large corpus of song lyrics, for training its AI product Claude. The case is being argued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild are among the parties filing the brief, which argues that copyright law does not permit Anthropic to systematically copy human-authored works without permission.
Anthropic’s actions, the brief argues, fail to meet the fair use doctrine in at least two ways: it is not transformative and its unauthorized training interferes with copyright holders who are signing licensing agreements with various tech companies.
“A healthy and incentivized licensing market advances the goals of copyright by permitting AI companies like Anthropic to access and use high-quality materials to train better, more sophisticated AI models while protecting rightsholders from uncompensated exploitation,” the brief states.
As part of its filing, the group includes a graph that shows the various licensing agreements publishers have reached with different AI companies. Among book publishers, HarperCollins and Taylor and Francis have reached agreements with Microsoft; Wiley has deals with P. School, Potato, OpenEvidence, and Perplexity; and the graph cites “reports of various unnamed publishers” signing agreements with Amazon and Google.
These licensing agreements, the brief argues, are crucial if publishers of original works are to retain “their ability to recoup their investment in quality journalism and authorship. Without copyright protection—and the ability to earn revenue—there would be no sustainable business model for the creation and distribution of creative works.”
In disputing Anthropic’s transformative argument, the brief notes that, “contrary to AI companies’ claims that their copying is transformative because copied works are not retained in their LLMs, a recent study by Stanford and Yale researchers confirms that textual works do not disappear once ingested into the models, but instead are memorized by the system and can be reproduced as output.”
According to a joint statement from the leaders of the four organizations involved, “This case illuminates the critical, collaborative licensing markets that are developing among copyright owners and technology companies for consumer-facing AI products, driving better, safer, and fairer outcomes for all involved. These partnerships are clearly in the public’s interest, but they will not be fully realized if categorical fair use arguments are permitted to overtake the equities and promise of the Copyright Act.”
In addition to the AAP and Authors Guild, the News/Media Alliance and International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers took part in supporting the brief.
