Welcome to Stems, a weekly newsletter on music, media, and tech written by Nathan Brackett, former editor at Rolling Stone and content exec at Amazon Music. Subscribe here for free to get every new issue in your inbox every Friday.
BMG Sees Authors Get Paid, Looks for Its Own Cut
But unfortunately, last year’s book publishing settlement might not be the best precedent for songwriters
Authors were able to point to straight-up piracy in their complaint against Anthropic — but BMG might not have the evidence to do that.
If you have any author friends, you've probably heard about Anthropic's recent $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers — the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, covering nearly 500,000 pirated works that Anthropic downloaded from shadow libraries like LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. Authors and publisher with titles on the infringed works list are collecting roughly $3,000 per title.
So it might seem like good timing for a copyright suit against the AI company if you are BMG. The German music publisher's lawsuit, filed Monday in the Northern District of California, alleges that when Anthropic built its Claude model it unlawfully copied and produced derivative works from from compositions owned by BMG.
Unfortunately, the authors' settlement doesn't quite translate into a slam dunk for BMG, because it only addressed Anthropic's use of pirated copies of books. On the broader question, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of “lawfully acquired” books for AI training — for example, physical books that Anthropic purchased and scanned — was "quintessentially transformative" and thus protected by fair use.
BMG also alleges piracy in its suit, but doesn't appear to have the same volume of documented evidence that the authors had assembled. So they are leaning on an argument that Anthropic is liable because of what Claude outputs rather than how it was trained. BMG documents specific instances of Claude reproducing substantial portions of lyrics from songs like "Uptown Funk" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" in response to user prompts, and argues that Anthropic intentionally designed it to do exactly this. That puts BMG closer in spirit to the UMG lawsuit against Suno, which makes similar output-based claims. It also makes the cleaner argument: that AI companies are building billion-dollar businesses on other people's work. But it’s an argument that hasn’t been fully tested in court.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this; email me at [email protected]
Behold: The World’s Finest Music-Themed Mini Crossword Got Bigger
We’re still calling this a Mini Crossword for branding purposes, but otherwise this 11×11 music-festival-themed grid is a grown-ass puzzle.
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