The Phillip Burton Federal Building. Photo Credit: Marincyclist
The “Cox effect” continues: Anthropic has shrugged off vicarious liability in the newer copyright infringement suit it’s facing from major music publishers including Concord.
Judge Eumi K. Lee just recently signed a related order, thereby approving the publisher plaintiffs’ voluntary dismissal of a vicarious infringement claim without prejudice.
As described in the original complaint, which arrived this past January, the filing parties were specifically accusing the AI giant of being vicariously liable for users’ and licensees’ alleged infringement of protected lyrics in Claude outputs.
“Anthropic has refused to take reasonable steps to prevent the widespread infringement by users of its AI models. As a direct and proximate result of such refusal, users of Anthropic’s AI models have infringed Publishers’ copyrights in the musical compositions,” the plaintiffs wrote.
Now, the claim is no more; Concord and others have also submitted an amended complaint that’s identical to the prior iteration save the removal of the vicarious infringement component.
The development didn’t arrive out of left field. In the first place, the publishers last month voluntarily dropped (with prejudice) contributory and vicarious claims from their older, technically distinct suit against Anthropic.
And as many know, the move followed the unanimous Supreme Court decision in favor of Cox Communications in a marathon major-label infringement dispute – a decision that significantly narrowed the scope of secondary liability.
It’d be difficult to understate the precedent’s music-world impact, which is readily apparent not only here, but in several ISP infringement cases, Epidemic’s long-running Meta legal battle, a showdown with stream-ripper Yout, and the X copyright confrontation.
With that, the focus in the publishers’ Anthropic complaints – plus a separate-but-similar action from BMG – has shifted to core allegations of direct training-related infringement, torrenting, and alleged DMCA violations concerning a dramatically increased number of works.
Meanwhile, Judge Lee is presiding over all three suits and, as a recent order described in greater detail, is therefore taking scheduling steps (including temporarily staying the cases and delaying certain deadlines) to “facilitate coordination between the related actions.”
An important closing note: Though the publishers axed both their vicarious and contributory infringement claims in the older Anthropic complaint, a contributory claim is still part of the newer suit.
However, as we touched on in related coverage, this claim has been adjusted to focus on alleged “contributory infringement by torrenting” on the part of Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann.
“Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann each knew that they were directing the Anthropic employees working under them to make unlawful copies from known pirated sources and to distribute those unlawful copies further,” the amended suit states.
“Accordingly, Dr. Amodei and Mr. Mann are contributorily liable for the infringement of Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions via torrenting, including the song lyrics contained therein,” the complaint proceeds.
