U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee said the alleged facts from the music publishers, led by Universal Music Publishing Group and Concord Music Group Inc., are enough at this stage to sustain claims of contributory and vicarious infringement, which the court had dismissed in March with an opportunity to amend.
Judge Lee rejected Anthropic's argument that the amended complaint failed to show it knew of or was willfully blind to its users' alleged infringement when they used Claude, its large language model chatbot. The judge gave credence to the publishers' assertion that Anthropic enacted guardrails before the suit to prevent Claude from producing song lyrics when requested.
"Publishers argue that the court can infer that Anthropic had 'actual or constructive knowledge' that 'Claude users infringed specific lyrics' based on Anthropic's implementation and development of 'guardrails,'" Judge Lee said.
The publishers also claimed that Anthropic knew every time the guardrails were triggered and that it had studied efforts by users to get song lyrics anyway.
Judge Lee said the publishers' claim against Anthropic for vicarious copyright infringement also has enough support to survive now, rejecting the company's argument that they had failed to allege that it had a financial incentive for its users' alleged infringement.
"Contrary to Anthropic's framing, publishers allege more than a financial interest in copyright infringement generally. Instead, publishers allege that Anthropic directly benefits from the infringement of publishers' works specifically, as required by the case law," Judge Lee said.
The publishers sued Anthropic in 2023, accusing it of "systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics" to train Claude. Their direct copyright infringement claim has not been the subject of Anthropic's motions to dismiss.
Judge Lee had also previously dismissed the publishers' claim that Anthropic violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by allegedly removing copyright management information from songs when they were included in training datasets. That claim survived this time, with the judge unpersuaded by Anthropic's argument that the publishers had failed to sufficiently claim it knew or had reason to know that removal of copyright management information would conceal its alleged infringement.
"Accepting publishers' allegations as true, the court infers that Anthropic had a reasonable basis to know that its intentional removal of [copyright management information] from the datasets used to train Claude would conceal its alleged infringement," Judge Lee said.
Counsel for the parties did not respond to requests for comment Monday.
Judge Lee's order came a day after U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen expressed frustration at what she views as the parties' repeated failure to resolve discovery disputes on their own.
"Obviously, the parties have lost the ability to [manage] discovery in an efficient manner in violation of Rule 11 [of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure] and lost sight of the proportionality mandate of Rule 26, to say nothing of this court's standing order requiring robust and sincere meet and confer efforts," Judge van Keulen wrote Sunday, ordering the parties to appear before her on Friday to explain why they should not be sanctioned.
Anthropic has also been sued by bestselling authors who accused it in a class action of using their copyrighted works for AI training. The company is settling the suit for $1.5 billion.
The publishers are represented by Matthew J. Oppenheim, Jennifer Pariser, Nicholas C. Hailey, Timothy Chung, Andrew Guerra and Audrey L. Adu-Appiah of Oppenheim & Zebrak LLP, Richard S. Mandel, Jonathan Z. King and Richard Dannay of Cowan Liebowitz & Latman PC, Jeffrey G. Knowles, Christopher J. Wiener, Thomas A. Harvey and Bina G. Patel of Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP, and Steven A. Riley, Tim Harvey and Grace C. Peck of Riley & Jacobson PLC.
Anthropic is represented by Joseph R. Wetzel, Andrew M. Gass, Brittany N. Lovejoy, Sarang V. Damle, Allison L. Stillman, Ivana Dukanovic and Sara Elisabeth Sampoli of Latham & Watkins LLP, and Sonal N. Mehta, Allison Bingxue Que, Ari Holtzblatt, Disha R. Patel, Joseph Taylor Gooch, Kyle Edwards Haugh, Louis W. Tompros, Robin C. Burrell and Stephanie Lin of WilmerHale.
The case is Concord Music Group Inc. et al. v. Anthropic PBC, case number 5:24-cv-03811, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
--Additional reporting by Bonnie Eslinger. Editing by Adam LoBelia.
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