Elvis rightsholders sue Anthropic for stealing songs and leaving them in Heartbreak Hotel

A supergroup of rights holders who own or control Elvis Presley songs have sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, alleging that the AI company stole The King’s works to train its AI models.

“The Elvis Plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the Defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” states a complaint [PDF] filed last Friday in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Despite owning 274 Elvis songs, the titles of which offer many apt metaphors to illustrate the plaintiffs’ grievances, the lawsuit uses a Shakesperean allusion.

“Defendant Anthropic has essentially put to the test the adage of whether monkeys and typewriters could, provided enough time, recreate Hamlet,” the complaint states. “However, rather than wait out the ‘infinite’ amount of time the infinite monkey theorem posits is necessary for said monkeys with typewriters to randomly, one letter at a time, string …