Anthropic sued over unlicensed song training
The working family in Nashville, or in a terraced house in Camden where a jobbing composer once wrote jingles for money and hymns for love, will notice this in the size of the check that does not arrive. That is where the analysis begins.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have taken Anthropic to court over what the filing calls tens of thousands of copyrighted songs, used, they say, to train the Claude models. Billions in damages are sought. The newspapers will tell you this is a fight for the songwriter. I have looked at the parties named in the suit, and I do not see a songwriter among them. I see two publishing houses and an artificial intelligence company, and not one composer’s name on either side of the writ.
This is the first thing plain English does for you that legal language will not. “Copyrighted work” sounds like it belongs to the man who wrote the tune. It does not. Somewhere between the songwriter’s kitchen table and the courtroom, the copyright was sold, assigned, or signed away for an advance that seemed like money at the time and looks, thirty years on, like a very bad bargain. Sony and Warner Chappell are not suing on behalf of composers. They are suing as owners of a commodity, and the commodity is other men’s labour, bought cheap and held tight. When the lawsuit speaks of “misuse,” what it protects is not the songwriter’s dignity but the publisher’s monopoly on extracting value from a melody written, in some cases, by a man three decades dead.
So here is the plain truth under the Latin: this is a quarrel between two kinds of landlord. One kind of landlord holds the deed to the song and rents it out one radio play at a time. The other kind of landlord has built a machine that eats songs wholesale and turns them into something it can rent out by the month, called Claude, to lawyers and students and men writing wedding speeches. Both landlords grew rich on the same field. Now they are fighting over who gets to keep charging admission to walk through it, and the man who ploughed the field originally is not in the room.
Consider the contested number itself - “tens of thousands” of songs. I have made my living by counting things other men preferred left uncounted: cottages pulled down, loaves shrunk, wages unpaid. A vague number in a legal filing is worth exactly what a vague number is always worth, which is: somebody has not yet counted, or does not want you to. Whether Claude was trained on these songs, and how, and to what effect, is a fact that could be established by looking - at the training data, at the model’s outputs, at the contracts. Instead we are given a round phrase built for headlines, and told to be satisfied.
Suppose the publishers win their billions. Where does the money go? Not to the man who wrote the second verse at his kitchen table in 1974 and signed the publishing deal because his landlord wanted rent by Friday. It goes into the accounts of Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, who will describe the victory, in their annual reports, as a triumph for the creative community, in the same tone a farmer might use to describe a good harvest gathered by hands he never paid overtime. And if Anthropic wins, the songwriter is no better off, only more thoroughly digested - his cadences now permanently seasoning a machine that will never send him a royalty statement, because it was never built to know his name.
I do not say Anthropic is blameless; a machine that eats a man’s work without his leave is a thief regardless of what it wears to court. But I will not applaud the publisher’s writ as justice for the composer any more than I would applaud one poacher suing another over the ownership of a stolen deer, while the forester who planted the wood goes hungry in the lodge. The verdict, whichever way it falls, will be read out in a courtroom in California. It will not be read out at any kitchen table where a songwriter once sat, pen in hand, believing the tune was his.