3 Count: More AI Lawsuits

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1: Universal, Concord, ABKCO Sue AI Company Anthropic for Copyright Violation

First off today, Jem Aswad at Variety reports that a group of music publishers have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that the company engaged in widespread copyright infringement of music their libraries.

The lawsuit deals with a series of AI models created by Anthropic named Claude. The lawsuit alleges that, in training Claude, the system fed a wide variety of copyright-protected content, including lyrics from popular songs. As such, they are seeking a jury trial and damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed. Given that the case lists 500 works, that brings the theoretical damages to as high as $75 million.

Founded by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has received widespread publicity and has been funded by many large tech companies, including Google, Amazon and Zoom. This is the first such lawsuit to be filed against Anthropic, though lawsuits against other AI companies have become increasingly common.

2: Authors sue Meta, Microsoft, Bloomberg in Latest AI Copyright Clash

Next up today, Blake Brittain at Reuters reports that a group of authors, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Lysa TerKeurst have filed a lawsuit against Meta, Microsoft and Bloomberg alleging that the companies used their work to train their AI systems.

The lawsuit, which aims to become a class action lawsuit, claims that the companies used a dataset named Books3, which allegedly contains thousands of pirated e-books, to train their AI systems.

The lawsuit is the latest in a long line against these companies, with visual artists and other authors alike claiming that their work was used without permission to train AI systems.

3: Vietnam Forms Specialist Unit to Tackle Pirate Sites Linked to “Organized Crime”

Finally today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications has announced that it will team up with two other government ministries to target and crack down on pirate sites.

While such planned crackdowns are not uncommon, what is unusual is that the announcement attempts to link pirate sites with organized crime, tying various pirate streaming services that are operating with loan sharks and online fraudsters.

As a result, the government has said they are forming a specialized unit that will tackle these issues specifically, hoping to address it both legally and through messaging to deter users from going to such sites.

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