Fair Use or Foul Play? The AI Fair Use Copyright Line; The National Law Review, July 2, 2025

Jodi Benassi of McDermott Will & Emery  , The National Law Review; Fair Use or Foul Play? The AI Fair Use Copyright Line

"Practice note: This is the first federal court decision analyzing the defense of fair use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. Two days after this decision issued, another Northern District of California judge ruled in Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. et al., Case No. 3:23-cv-03417, and concluded that the AI technology at issue in his case was transformative. However, the basis for his ruling in favor of Meta on the question of fair use was not transformation, but the plaintiffs’ failure “to present meaningful evidence that Meta’s use of their works to create [a generative AI engine] impacted the market” for the books."

Eminem, AI and me: why artists need new laws in the digital age; The Guardian, July 2, 2025

 Alexander Hurst , The Guardian; Eminem, AI and me: why artists need new laws in the digital age

"Song lyrics, my publisher informs me, are subject to notoriously strict copyright enforcement and the cost to buy the rights is often astronomical. Fat chance as well, then, of me quoting Eminem to talk about how Lose Yourself seeped into the psyche of a generation when he rapped: “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, this opportunity comes once in a lifetime.”

Oh would it be different if I were an AI company with a large language model (LLM), though. I could scrape from the complete discography of the National and Eminem, and the lyrics of every other song ever written. Then, when a user prompted something like, “write a rap in the style of Eminem about losing money, and draw inspiration from the National’s Bloodbuzz Ohio”, my word correlation program – with hundreds of millions of paying customers and a market capitalisation worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars – could answer:

“I still owe money to the money to the money I owe,

But I spit gold out my throat when I flow,

So go tell the bank they can take what they like

I already gave my soul to the mic.”

And that, according to rulings last month by the US courts, is somehow “fair use” and is perplexingly not copyright infringement at all, despite no royalties having been paid to anyone in the process."

AI companies start winning the copyright fight; The Guardian, July 1, 2025

 Blake Montgomery , The Guardian; AI companies start winning the copyright fight

"The lawsuits over AI-generated text were filed first, and, as their rulings emerge, the next question in the copyright fight is whether decisions about one type of media will apply to the next.

“The specific media involved in the lawsuit – written works versus images versus videos versus audio – will certainly change the fair-use analysis in each case,” said John Strand, a trademark and copyright attorney with the law firm Wolf Greenfield. “The impact on the market for the copyrighted works is becoming a key factor in the fair-use analysis, and the market for books is different than that for movies.”

To Strand, the cases over images seem more favorable to copyright holders, as the AI models are allegedly producing images identical to the copyrighted ones in the training data.

A bizarre and damning fact was revealed in the Anthropic ruling, too: the company had pirated and stored some 7m books to create a training database for its AI. To remediate its wrongdoing, the company bought physical copies and scanned them, digitizing the text. Now the owner of 7m physical books that no longer held any utility for it, Anthropic destroyed them. The company bought the books, diced them up, scanned the text and threw them away, Ars Technica reports. There are less destructive ways to digitize books, but they are slower. The AI industry is here to move fast and break things.

Anthropic laying waste to millions of books presents a crude literalization of the ravenous consumption of content necessary for AI companies to create their products."

The US Copyright Office is wrong about artificial intelligence; The Hill, June 30, 2025

 THINH H. NGUYEN AND DEREK E. BAMBAUER, The Hill ; The US Copyright Office is wrong about artificial intelligence

"AI is too important to allow copyright to impede its progress, especially as America seeks to maintain its global competitiveness in tech innovation."

An AI firm won a lawsuit for copyright infringement — but may face a huge bill for piracy; Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2025

 Michael Hiltzik , Los Angeles Times; An AI firm won a lawsuit for copyright infringement — but may face a huge bill for piracy

[Kip Currier: Excellent informative overview of some of the principal issues, players, stakes, and recent decisions in the ongoing AI copyright legal battles. Definitely worth 5-10 minutes of your time to read and reflect on.

A key take-away, derived from Judge Vince Chhabria's decision in last week's Meta win, is that:

Artists and authors can win their copyright infringement cases if they produce evidence showing the bots are affecting their market. Chhabria all but pleaded for the plaintiffs to bring some such evidence before him: 

“It’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books...to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books.” 

But “the plaintiffs never so much as mentioned it,” he lamented.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-06-27/an-ai-firm-won-a-lawsuit-over-copyright-infringement-but-may-face-a-huge-bill-for-piracy]

[Excerpt]

"Anthropic had to acknowledge a troubling qualification in Alsup’s order, however. Although he found for the company on the copyright issue, he also noted that it had downloaded copies of more than 7 million books from online “shadow libraries,” which included countless copyrighted works, without permission. 

That action was “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” Alsup concluded. “We will have a trial on the pirated copies...and the resulting damages,” he advised Anthropic ominously: Piracy on that scale could expose the company to judgments worth untold millions of dollars...

“Neither case is going to be the last word” in the battle between copyright holders and AI developers, says Aaron Moss, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in copyright law. With more than 40 lawsuits on court dockets around the country, he told me, “it’s too early to declare that either side is going to win the ultimate battle.”...

With billions of dollars, even trillions, at stake for AI developers and the artistic community at stake, no one expects the law to be resolved until the issue reaches the Supreme Court, presumably years from now...

But Anthropic also downloaded copies of more than 7 million books from online “shadow libraries,” which include untold copyrighted works without permission. 

Alsup wrote that Anthropic “could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid ‘legal/practice/business slog,’” Alsup wrote. (He was quoting Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei.)...

Artists and authors can win their copyright infringement cases if they produce evidence showing the bots are affecting their market."...

The truth is that the AI camp is just trying to get out of paying for something instead of getting it for free. Never mind the trillions of dollars in revenue they say they expect over the next decade — they claim that licensing will be so expensive it will stop the march of this supposedly historic technology dead in its tracks.

Chhabria aptly called this argument “nonsense.” If using books for training is as valuable as the AI firms say they are, he noted, then surely a market for book licensing will emerge. That is, it will — if the courts don’t give the firms the right to use stolen works without compensation."

The Anthropic Copyright Ruling Exposes Blind Spots on AI; Bloomberg, June 26, 2025

Dave Lee , Bloomberg; The Anthropic Copyright Ruling Exposes Blind Spots on AI

[Kip Currier: It's still early days in the AI copyright legal battles underway between AI tech companies and everyone else whose training data was "scarfed up" to enable the former to create lucrative AI tools and products. But cases like this week's Anthropic lawsuit win and another suit won by Meta (with some issues still to be adjudicated regarding the use of pirated materials as AI training data) are finally now giving us some more discernible "tea leaves" and "black letter law" as to how courts are likely to rule vis-a-vis AI inputs.

This week being the much ballyhooed 50th anniversary of the so-called "1st summer blockbuster flick" Jaws ("you're gonna need a bigger boat"), these rulings make me think we the public may need a bigger copyright law schema that sets out protections for the creatives making the fuel that enables stratospherically profitable AI innovations. The Jaws metaphor may be a bit on-the-nose, but one can't help but view AI tech companies akin to rapacious sharks that are imperiling the financial survival and long-standing business models of human creators.

As touched on in this Bloomberg article, too, there's a moral argument that what AI tech folks have done with the uncompensated use of creative works, without permission, doesn't mean that it's ethically justifiable simply because a court may say it's legal. Or that these companies shouldn't be required by updated federal copyright legislation and licensing frameworks to fairly compensate creators for the use of their copyrighted works. After all, billionaire tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Altman would never allow others to do to them what they've done to creatives with impunity and zero contrition.

Are you listening, Congress?

Or are all of you in the pockets of AI tech company lobbyists, rather than representing the needs and interests of all of your constituents and not just the billionaire class.] 

[Excerpt]

"In what is shaping up to be a long, hard fight over the use of creative works, round one has gone to the AI makers. In the first such US decision of its kind, District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic’s use of millions of books to train its artificial-intelligence model, without payment to the sources, was legal under copyright law because it was “transformative — spectacularly so.”...

If a precedent has been set, as several observers believe, it stands to cripple one of the few possible AI monetization strategies for rights holders, which is to sell licenses to firms for access to their work. Some of these deals have already been made while the “fair use” question has been in limbo, deals that emerged only after the threat of legal action. This ruling may have just taken future deals off the table...

Alsup was right when he wrote that “the technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.”...

But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t pay its way. Nobody would dare suggest Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang hand out his chips free. No construction worker is asked to keep costs down by building data center walls for nothing. Software engineers aren’t volunteering their time to Meta Platforms Inc. in awe of Mark Zuckerberg’s business plan — they instead command salaries of $100 million and beyond. 

Yet, as ever, those in the tech industry have decided that creative works, and those who create them, should be considered of little or no value and must step aside in service of the great calling of AI — despite being every bit as vital to the product as any other factor mentioned above. As science-fiction author Harlan Ellison said in his famous sweary rant, nobody ever wants to pay the writer if they can get away with it. When it comes to AI, paying creators of original work isn’t impossible, it’s just inconvenient. Legislators should leave companies no choice."

Judge dismisses authors’ copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training; AP, June 25, 2025

MATT O’BRIEN AND BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP; Judge dismisses authors’ copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training

"Although Meta prevailed in its request to dismiss the case, it could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. In his 40-page ruling, Chhabria repeatedly indicated reasons to believe that Meta and other AI companies have turned into serial copyright infringers as they train their technology on books and other works created by humans, and seemed to be inviting other authors to bring cases to his court presented in a manner that would allow them to proceed to trial.

The judge scoffed at arguments that requiring AI companies to adhere to decades-old copyright laws would slow down advances in a crucial technology at a pivotal time. “These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”

Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors' copyright lawsuit; Reuters, June 24, 2025

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors' copyright lawsuit

 "A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law.

Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made "fair use" of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic's copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a "central library" infringed the authors' copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement."

The U.S. Copyright Office used to be fairly low-drama. Not anymore; NPR, June 6, 2025

 Andrew Limbong, NPR ; The U.S. Copyright Office used to be fairly low-drama. Not anymore

"The U.S. Copyright Office is normally a quiet place. It mostly exists to register materials for copyright and advise members of Congress on copyright issues. Experts and insiders used words like "stable" and "sleepy" to describe the agency. Not anymore...

Inside the AI report

That big bombshell report on generative AI and copyright can be summed up like this – in some instances, using copyrighted material to train AI models could count as fair use. In other cases, it wouldn't.

The conclusion of the report says this: "Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs—all of which can affect the market."

"It's very even keeled," said Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, a group that represents artists and publishers pushing for stronger copyright laws.

Kupferschmid said the report avoids generalizations and takes arguments on a case-by-case basis.

"Perlmutter was beloved, no matter whether you agreed with her or not, because she did the hard work," Kupferschmid said. "She always was very thoughtful and considered all these different viewpoints."

It remains to be seen how the report will be used in the dozens of legal cases over copyright and AI usage."

Mike Kelley vs. Trump: The Photo That Could Spark a Presidential Copyright War; Fstoppers, June 1, 2025

 Patrick Hall, Fstoppers; Mike Kelley vs. Trump: The Photo That Could Spark a Presidential Copyright War

"Your Thoughts?

What do you think will happen to this case when it is filed? Obviously something like this will take years to make its way through the courts, and perhaps Trump will not even be president by the time it makes it to the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals where it will most likely reside. Do you think Mike has a strong enough case for Willful Infringement under statutory infringement or because this is a meme that perhaps originated somewhere else on the internet, could it be viewed as unwilling? Do you think Trump would ever succeed at claiming his posts on Truth Social fall under official acts of a sitting president?"

Author sides with students in revolt over book passage used in AP exam; The Washington Post, May 24, 2025

 Kim Bellware, The Washington Post; Author sides with students in revolt over book passage used in AP exam

"Serpell, herself a longtime critic of standardized tests, said the College Board, the billion-dollar standardized-testing juggernaut that administers them, did not ask permission to use her work and distorted her writing.

“Stranger Faces,” a collection of essays on the pleasure people take in unusual faces in works of art, was geared toward professional scholars, not high school readers, Serpell said, and she insists that the complexity of her writing can only be understood in fuller context. The exam excerpt, she said, omitted critical writing that would have made her arguments and rhetorical effects clearer.

As Serpell deals with the fallout — which, in some cases, she said, included death threats — she is siding with the students, taking up their arguments with the College Board and touching off a heated online debate over academic ethics."

Judge Hints Anthropic’s AI Training on Books Is Fair Use; Bloomberg Law, May 22, 2025

 

Annelise Levy

, Bloomberg Law; Judge Hints Anthropic’s AI Training on Books Is Fair Use

"A California federal judge is leaning toward finding Anthropic PBC violated copyright law when it made initial copies of pirated books, but that its subsequent uses to train their generative AI models qualify as fair use.

“I’m inclined to say they did violate the Copyright Act but the subsequent uses were fair use,” Judge William Alsup said Thursday during a hearing in San Francisco. “That’s kind of the way I’m leaning right now,” he said, but concluded the 90-minute hearing by clarifying that his decision isn’t final. “Sometimes I say that and change my mind."...

The first judge to rule will provide a window into how federal courts interpret the fair use argument for training generative artificial intelligence models with copyrighted materials. A decision against Anthropic could disrupt the billion-dollar business model behind many AI companies, which rely on the belief that training with unlicensed copyrighted content doesn’t violate the law."

We're All Copyright Owners. Why You Need to Care About AI and Copyright; CNET, May 19, 2025

Katelyn Chedraoui , CNET; We're All Copyright Owners. Why You Need to Care About AI and Copyright

"Most of us don't think about copyright very often in our daily lives. But in the age of generative AI, it has quickly become one of the most important issues in the development and outputs of chatbots and image and video generators. It's something that affects all of us because we're all copyright owners and authors...

What does all of this mean for the future?

Copyright owners are in a bit of a holding pattern for now. But beyond the legal and ethical implications, copyright in the age of AI raises important questions about the value of creative work, the cost of innovation and the ways in which we need or ought to have government intervention and protections. 

There are two distinct ways to view the US's intellectual property laws, Mammen said. The first is that these laws were enacted to encourage and reward human flourishing. The other is more economically focused; the things that we're creating have value, and we want our economy to be able to recognize that value accordingly."

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired; The Register, May 12, 2025

 Simon Sherwood, The Register; US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

"The head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired, the day after agency concluded that builders of AI models use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use.

The office’s opinion on fair use came in a draft of the third part of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence. The first part considered digital replicas and the second tackled whether it is possible to copyright the output of generative AI.

The office published the draft [PDF] of Part 3, which addresses the use of copyrighted works in the development of generative AI systems, on May 9th.

The draft notes that generative AI systems “draw on massive troves of data, including copyrighted works” and asks: “Do any of the acts involved require the copyright owners’ consent or compensation?”"

Trump fires Copyright Office director after report raises questions about AI training; TechCrunch, May 11, 2025

 Anthony Ha , TechCrunch; Trump fires Copyright Office director after report raises questions about AI training

"As for how this ties into Musk (a Trump ally) and AI, Morelle linked to a pre-publication version of a U.S. Copyright Office report released this week that focuses on copyright and artificial intelligence. (In fact, it’s actually part three of a longer report.)

In it, the Copyright Office says that while it’s “not possible to prejudge” the outcome of individual cases, there are limitations on how much AI companies can count on “fair use” as a defense when they train their models on copyrighted content. For example, the report says research and analysis would probably be allowed.

“But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” it continues.

The Copyright Office goes on to suggest that government intervention “would be premature at this time,” but it expresses hope that “licensing markets” where AI companies pay copyright holders for access to their content “should continue to develop,” adding that “alternative approaches such as extended collective licensing should be considered to address any market failure.”

AI companies including OpenAI currently face a number of lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement, and OpenAI has also called for the U.S. government to codify a copyright strategy that gives AI companies leeway through fair use.

Musk, meanwhile, is both a co-founder of OpenAI and of a competing startup, xAI (which is merging with the former Twitter). He recently expressed support for Square founder Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law.”"

Meta lawsuit poses first big test of AI copyright battle; Financial Times, May 1, 2025

 Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times; Meta lawsuit poses first big test of AI copyright battle

 "The case, which has been brought by about a dozen authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, is centred on the $1.4tn social media giant’s use of LibGen, a so-called shadow library of millions of books, academic articles and comics, to train its Llama AI models. The ruling will have wide-reaching implications in the fierce copyright battle between artists and AI groups and is one of several lawsuits around the world that allege technology groups are using content without permission."

Meta Faces Copyright Reckoning in Authors’ Generative AI Case; Bloomberg Law, April 30, 2025

Isaiah Poritz, Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; Meta Faces Copyright Reckoning in Authors’ Generative AI Case

"The way courts will view the fair use argument for training generative artificial intelligence models with copyrighted materials will be tested Thursday in a San Francisco courtroom, when the first of dozens of such lawsuits reaches summary judgment.

Meta Platforms Inc. and a group of authors including comedian Sarah Silverman will square off before Judge Vince Chhabria, who will decide whether Meta’s use of pirated books to train its AI model Llama qualifies as fair use, or if the issue should be left to a jury."

Creators Are Losing the AI Copyright Battle. We Have to Keep Fighting (Guest Column); The Hollywood Reporter, April 16, 2025

 Ed Newton-Rex ; Creators Are Losing the AI Copyright Battle. We Have to Keep Fighting (Guest Column)

"The struggle between AI companies and creatives around “training data” — or what you and I would refer to as people’s life’s work — may be the defining struggle of this generation for the media industries. AI companies want to exploit creators’ work without paying them, using it to train AI models that compete with those creators; creators and rights holders are doing everything they can to stop them."

The real argument artists should be making against AI; Vox, April 16, 2025

Sigal Samuel, Vox; The real argument artists should be making against AI

[Paywall to access]

Why Musk and Dorsey want to ‘delete all IP law’; The Washington Post, April 15, 2025

 

Analysis by Gerrit De Vynck

 and 

Will Oremus

with research by 

Andrea Jiménez

 , The Washington Post; Why Musk and Dorsey want to ‘delete all IP law’

"Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square, posted a cryptic and drastic demand on Elon Musk’s X over the weekend: “delete all IP law.” The post drew a quick reply from Mr. X himself: “I agree.”

Musk’s laconic response amplified Dorsey’s post to his 220 million followers and sparked a debate that drew in a cast of characters including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, tech lawyer and former vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, novelist Walter Kirn, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and the technologist and early Twitter developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, a.k.a. Rabble, among others...

Serious policy idea or not, the concord between Dorsey and Musk highlights how the debate over AI and copyright law is coming to a head in Silicon Valley.

How it’s resolved will have major ramifications for the tech companies, creative people and their livelihoods and the overall AI race."