Federal judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models in books published without the author’s permission is legal for humanity to be integrated. This is when the court first gave the claims of AI companies that the doctrine of fair use can exempt AI companies from negligence when training large-scale language models (LLMS) using copyrighted materials.
The decision will be a blow to authors, artists and publishers who have filed dozens of lawsuits against companies such as Openai, Meta, Midjourney, and Google. This ruling does not guarantee that other judges will follow the lead of Justice Alsup, but it lays the foundation for the courts to side with tech companies through creatives.
These cases often depend on how judges interpret the doctrine of fair use. This is a perennial sculpture of copyright laws that has not been updated since 1976, and has not been updated before the Internet.
Fair Use rulings consider whether they are replicated for commercial profits (you can write fan fiction for “Star Wars” but can’t sell it), and how transformative the derivative work is (you can use parody and education to be viable) (you can use parody and education to be viable).
Companies like Meta have held similar fair use debates to defend the training of copyrighted works, but before this week’s decision, it was less clear how the courts would sway.
In this particular case, Bartzv. The Enthropic plaintiffs’ authors also questioned the way in which humanity achieved and preserved their works. According to the lawsuit, humanity tried to create a “central library” of “all books in the world” to maintain “forever.” However, these copyrighted millions of books were downloaded for free from pirate sites, which is clearly illegal.
The judge found that training of these materials for humanity was fair use, but the court would hold a trial on the nature of the “central library.”
“There will be a trial on the pirated copies used to create the Central Library of Mankind and the resulting damages,” Justice Allsup wrote in the decision. “After that humanity later purchased a copy of a book that he had stolen from the Internet, he will not be exempt from liability for theft, but it could affect the extent of statutory damage.”
